mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning

arXiv 2605.14696 ↗First posted 14 May 2026cs.CVcited by 15

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

  1. 2026ResWorld: Temporal Residual World Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving11 Feb
  2. 2025DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World29 Dec
  3. 2025Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving11 Dec
  4. 2025DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving14 Oct
  5. 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model1 Jul
  6. 2025Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Driving30 Jun
  7. 2025Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)22 May
  8. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model2 Apr
  9. 2024DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformers24 Dec
  10. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model12 Jun
  11. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles22 Jun

Other references · 83

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  3. 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,586
  4. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  5. 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,523
  6. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  7. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  8. 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,422
  9. 2025DINOv3cited by 1,414
  10. 2024Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Datacited by 1,360
  11. 2022Planning-oriented Autonomous Drivingcited by 1,087
  12. 2021Scaling Vision Transformerscited by 999
38 more
  1. 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 995
  2. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  3. 2023Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameterscited by 694
  4. 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 692
  5. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 661
  6. 2023VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Drivingcited by 622
  7. 2023DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answeringcited by 536
  8. 2024DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 490
  9. 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 485
  10. 2024Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimationcited by 395
  11. 2021Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 377
  12. 2023Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Imagecited by 365
  13. 2024NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarkingcited by 354
  14. 2024DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 334
  15. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 289
  16. 2024Diffusion Policy Policy Optimizationcited by 280
  17. 2025AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 260
  18. 2024SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representationcited by 241
  19. 2025ReCogDrive: A Reinforced Cognitive Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 198
  20. 2025ORION: A Holistic End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework by Vision-Language Instructed Action Generationcited by 178
  21. 2025FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Drivingcited by 166
  22. 2025Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 150
  23. 2025Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 134
  24. 2025GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 120
  25. 2025Latent Diffusion Model without Variational Autoencodercited by 88
  26. 2025DriveMoE: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 86
  27. 2025Don't Shake the Wheel: Momentum-Aware Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 84
  28. 2025DiffusionDriveV2: Reinforcement Learning-Constrained Truncated Diffusion Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 56
  29. 2025Interleave-VLA: Enhancing Robot Manipulation with Interleaved Image-Text Instructionscited by 51
  30. 2025Bridging Past and Future: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Historical Prediction and Planningcited by 48
  31. 2025Distilling Multi-modal Large Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 46
  32. 2026Driving on Registerscited by 44
  33. 2025RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planningcited by 41
  34. 2025Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Trainingcited by 39
  35. 2026SGDrive: Scene-to-Goal Hierarchical World Cognition for Autonomous Drivingcited by 38
  36. 2025SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scalecited by 36
  37. 2025HiP-AD: Hierarchical and Multi-Granularity Planning with Deformable Attention for Autonomous Driving in a Single Decodercited by 35
  38. 2025From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Predictioncited by 33

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  1. 2026UniDrive-WM: Unified Understanding, Planning and Generation World Model for Autonomous Driving
  2. 2026Learning Vision-Language-Action World Models for Autonomous Driving
  3. 2026PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  4. 2026Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
  5. 2026Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving
  6. 2026WorldVLM: Combining World Model Forecasting and Vision-Language Reasoning
  7. 2026ReDrive: Shaping Representations with World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
  8. 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving