mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

World models for autonomous driving

320 papers1 this weekHigh confidence in this grouping: the papers form one clear topicHigh confidence in this grouping: the papers form one clear topic · About

Keywords: driving, autonomous, autonomous driving, scene, occupancy

Key facts. World models for autonomous driving: 320 papers on arXiv since 2013 (data through 7 Oct 2026). 139 of its 320 mapped papers (43%) cite “GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving” (2023, arXiv 2309.17080). 123 of its 320 mapped papers (38%) cite “Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving” (2023, arXiv 2311.17918). 19 new papers 17 Sep–7 Oct.

What’s new

17 Sep – 7 Oct 2026

19 new papers, 17 Sep – 7 Oct; 1 this week.

  1. This week · 1
  2. GeoWM: Efficient Direct World Modeling in Explicit Geometry also fits: Video-generation world models and simulators
  3. Earlier · 18
  4. ReWAM: Reciprocal World Action Models for Interactive Autonomous Driving also fits: World models for navigation
  5. V2X-WAM: A Cooperative World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  6. RoXDrive: Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Action-Faithful Rollouts
  7. MomWorld: Momentum-Aware Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Autonomous Driving
  8. PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving
  9. World4Scorer: Outcome-Grounded World Modeling for Autonomous Driving
  10. CoDrive: Cross-Vehicle World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Trajectory Control for Cooperative Driving
  11. AD-E2E-JEPA: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture For End-to-End Autonomous Driving
  12. ReDrive: Shaping Representations with World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
All 19
  1. VehDyn: A Driving World Model Benchmark for Vehicle Dynamics
  2. WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving
  3. HelloWorld: Towards Practical Applications of Generative Driving World Models
  4. SlackDrive: Reclaiming Runtime Slack for Adaptive Driving Inference
  5. ForeDrive: Foresight-Guided End-to-End Autonomous Driving with a Planning-Relevant Latent World Model
  6. Relationally Grounded Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving
  7. DriveReferee: Geometric Safety Verdicts Need Not Be Learned for Driving World-Action Models
  8. ZYT-World: A Real-Time Controllable World Model for Closed-Loop Autonomous-Driving Simulation
  9. MM-Future: Multi-Mode Joint World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving

Foundations

Most cited by papers here

  1. GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving2023cited by 139 here
  2. Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving2023cited by 123 here
  3. Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability2024cited by 115 here
  4. CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator2017cited by 95 here
  5. OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving2023cited by 94 here

Lineage

The papers this direction builds on, oldest first.

Each paper on the line cites the one before.

  1. 2018World Modelscited by 57 here
  2. 2019Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imaginationcited by 53 here
  3. 2020Mastering Atari with Discrete World Modelscited by 43 here
  4. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 45 here
  5. 2023DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 84 here
  6. 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 139 here
  7. 2023Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 123 here
  8. 2024DriveDreamer-2: LLM-Enhanced World Models for Diverse Driving Video Generationcited by 65 here
  9. 2024Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllabilitycited by 115 here
  10. 2025Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 57 here
14 more it builds on, not in this chain
  1. 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 95 here
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 51 here
  3. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehiclescited by 72 here
  4. 2022BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformerscited by 51 here
  5. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 52 here
  6. 2023ADriver-I: A General World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 43 here
  7. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 50 here
  8. 2023OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 94 here
  9. 2024GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 48 here
  10. 2024GenAD: Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 45 here
  11. 2024DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 47 here
  12. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Modelcited by 72 here
  13. 2025End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Modelcited by 53 here
  14. 2025World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Modelcited by 51 here

The 24 most cited of 394.

Browse

30 of 320, ranked 6–35

  1. 6DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Driving202384
  2. 7Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model202472
  3. 8NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles202172
  4. 9DriveDreamer-2: LLM-Enhanced World Models for Diverse Driving Video Generation202465
  5. 10Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Driving202557
  6. 11End-to-End Driving with Online Trajectory Evaluation via BEV World Model202553
  7. 12World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model202551
  8. 13BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers202251
  9. 14GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving202448
  10. 15DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Driving202447
All 30
  1. 16GenAD: Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving202445
  2. 17DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving202543
  3. 18DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformers202443
  4. 19ADriver-I: A General World Model for Autonomous Driving202343
  5. 20Occ3D: A Large-Scale 3D Occupancy Prediction Benchmark for Autonomous Driving202338
  6. 21GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving202536
  7. 22Copilot4D: Learning Unsupervised World Models for Autonomous Driving via Discrete Diffusion202333
  8. 23Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving202333
  9. 24Point Cloud Forecasting as a Proxy for 4D Occupancy Forecasting202332
  10. 25Driving in the Occupancy World: Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via World Models for Autonomous Driving202431
  11. 26DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation202431
  12. 27World Models for Autonomous Driving: An Initial Survey202429
  13. 28DOME: Taming Diffusion Model into High-Fidelity Controllable Occupancy World Model202427
  14. 29OccLLaMA: An Occupancy-Language-Action Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving202426
  15. 30ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving202525
  16. 31Differentiable Raycasting for Self-supervised Occupancy Forecasting202225
  17. 32Doe-1: Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Large World Model202424
  18. 33DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT202424
  19. 34Enhance Sample Efficiency and Robustness of End-to-end Urban Autonomous Driving via Semantic Masked World Model202224
  20. 35Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting202423