A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in autonomous driving have been propelled by advances in robust world modeling, fundamentally transforming how vehicles interpret dynamic scenes and execute safe decision-making. World models have emerged as a linchpin technology, offering high-fidelity representations of the driving environment that integrate multi-sensor data, semantic cues, and temporal dynamics. This paper systematically reviews recent advances in world models for autonomous driving, proposing a three-tiered taxonomy: (i) Generation of Future Physical World, covering Image-, BEV-, OG-, and PC-based generation methods that enhance scene evolution modeling through diffusion models and 4D occupancy forecasting; (ii) Behavior Planning for Intelligent Agents, combining rule-driven and learning-based paradigms with cost map optimization and reinforcement learning for trajectory generation in complex traffic conditions; (ii) Interaction between Prediction and Planning, achieving multi-agent collaborative decision-making through latent space diffusion and memory-augmented architectures. The study further analyzes training paradigms, including self-supervised learning, multimodal pretraining, and generative data augmentation, while evaluating world models' performance in scene understanding and motion prediction tasks. Future research must address key challenges in self-supervised representation learning, multimodal fusion, and advanced simulation to advance the practical deployment of world models in complex urban environments. Overall, the comprehensive analysis provides a technical roadmap for harnessing the transformative potential of world models in advancing safe and reliable autonomous driving solutions.