EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning
On the map: World models → World models for autonomous driving
also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Data scaling plays a pivotal role in the pursuit of general intelligence. However, the prevailing perception-planning paradigm in autonomous driving relies heavily on expensive manual annotations to supervise trajectory planning, which severely limits its scalability. Conversely, although existing perception-free driving world models achieve impressive driving performance, their real-world reasoning ability for planning is solely built on next frame image forecasting. Due to the lack of enough supervision, these models often struggle with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in unsatisfactory trajectory planning. In this paper, we propose EponaV2, a novel paradigm of driving world models, which achieves high-quality planning with comprehensive future reasoning. Inspired by how human drivers anticipate 3D geometry and semantics, we train our model to forecast more comprehensive future representations, which can be additionally decoded to future geometry and semantic maps. Extracting the 3D and semantic modalities enables our model to deeply understand the surrounding environment, and the future prediction task significantly enhances the real-world reasoning capabilities of EponaV2, ultimately leading to improved trajectory planning. Moreover, inspired by the training recipe of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a flow matching group relative policy optimization mechanism to further improve planning accuracy. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances of EponaV2 among perception-free models on three NAVSIM benchmarks (+1.3PDMS, +5.5EPDMS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 94 of its 99 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.
Builds on
94 of 99 references.
Closest ancestors · 11
Same direction, newest first
- 2026ResWorld: Temporal Residual World Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving11 Feb
- 2025DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World29 Dec
- 2025Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving11 Dec
- 2025DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving14 Oct
- 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model1 Jul
- 2025Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Driving30 Jun
- 2025Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)22 May
- 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
- 2024DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformers24 Dec
- 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
- 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun
Other references · 83
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
- 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,586
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,523
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
- 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,422
- 2025DINOv3cited by 1,414
- 2024Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Datacited by 1,360
- 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
- 2021Scaling Vision Transformerscited by 999
38 more
- 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 995
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
- 2023Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameterscited by 694
- 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 692
- 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 661
- 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
- 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 536
- 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 490
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
- 2024Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimationcited by 395
- 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 377
- 2023Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Imagecited by 365
- 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
- 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
- 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
- 2024Diffusion Policy Policy Optimizationcited by 280
- 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 260
- 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
- 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 198
- 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 178
- 2025FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Drivingcited by 166
- 2025Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 150
- 2025Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 134
- 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 120
- 2025Latent Diffusion Model without Variational Autoencodercited by 88
- 2025DriveMoE: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 86
- 2025Don't Shake the Wheel: Momentum-Aware Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 84
- 2025DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 56
- 2025Interleave-VLA: Enhancing Robot Manipulation with Interleaved Image-Text Instructionscited by 51
- 2025Bridging Past and Future: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Historical Prediction and Planningcited by 48
- 2025Distilling Multi-modal Large Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 46
- 2026Driving on Registerscited by 44
- 2025RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planningcited by 41
- 2025Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Trainingcited by 39
- 2026SGDrive: Scene-to-Goal Hierarchical World Cognition for Autonomous Drivingcited by 38
- 2025SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scalecited by 36
- 2025HiP-AD: Hierarchical and Multi-Granularity Planning with Deformable Attention for Autonomous Driving in a Single Decodercited by 35
- 2025From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Predictioncited by 33
50 most cited of 83 All 83 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.
15 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2026Qwen-Drive-1.0: An Initial Step towards a Vision-Language Foundation Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 9
- 2026RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Modelscited by 4
- 2026GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
- 2026PhysEditWorld: A Large-Scale Dataset Toward Physics-Editable World Modelscited by 2
- 2026Post-Training in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026GeoWorldAD: Geometry World Action Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 2
- 2026SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
- 2026How Far Can 5,500 Hours of Driving Take You? A Scaling Law Analysis of Video Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Drivingcited by 0
- 2026WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Action14 Oct 2026
- 2026DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving13 Oct 2026
- 2026MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planning10 Oct 2026
- 2026PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving29 Sep 2026
- 2026WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving24 Sep 2026
- 2026SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving3 Sep 2026
- 2026Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving3 Sep 2026
- 2026Qwen-Drive-1.0: An Initial Step towards a Vision-Language Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving31 Aug 2026
- 2026How Far Can 5,500 Hours of Driving Take You? A Scaling Law Analysis of Video Diffusion Models28 Aug 2026
- 2026GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Driving24 Aug 2026
- 2026RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Models20 Aug 2026
- 2026SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Driving4 Aug 2026
3 more
- 2026RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Modelscited by 4
- 2026GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
- 2026PhysEditWorld: A Large-Scale Dataset Toward Physics-Editable World Modelscited by 2
- 2026GeoWorldAD: Geometry World Action Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 2
- 2026SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
- 2026Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Drivingcited by 0
- 2026WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planningcited by 0
- 2026DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
- 2026VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Actioncited by 0
- 2026VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Action14 Oct 2026
- 2026DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving13 Oct 2026
- 2026MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planning10 Oct 2026
- 2026PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving29 Sep 2026
- 2026WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving24 Sep 2026
- 2026SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving3 Sep 2026
- 2026Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving3 Sep 2026
- 2026GeoWAM: Visual Geometry World Action Models for Autonomous Driving24 Aug 2026
- 2026RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Models20 Aug 2026
- 2026GeoWorldAD: Geometry World Action Model for Autonomous Driving20 Jul 2026
- 2026PhysEditWorld: A Large-Scale Dataset Toward Physics-Editable World Models25 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026UniDrive-WM: Unified Understanding, Planning and Generation World Model for Autonomous Driving
- 2026Learning Vision-Language-Action World Models for Autonomous Driving
- 2026PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
- 2026Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
- 2026Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving
- 2026WorldVLM: Combining World Model Forecasting and Vision-Language Reasoning
- 2026ReDrive: Shaping Representations with World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
- 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving