arXiv · 2603.14497
WorldVLM: Combining World Model Forecasting and Vision-Language Reasoning
Abstract
Autonomous driving systems depend on on models that can reason about high-level scene contexts and accurately predict the dynamics of their surrounding environment. Vision- Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for decision-making and scene understanding, offering strong capabilities in contextual reasoning. However, their limited spatial comprehension constrains their effectiveness as end-to-end driving models. World Models (WM) internalize environmental dynamics to predict future scene evolution. Recently explored as ego-motion predictors and foundation models for autonomous driving, they represent a promising direction for addressing key challenges in the field, particularly enhancing generalization while maintaining dynamic prediction. To leverage the complementary strengths of context-based decision making and prediction, we propose WorldVLM: A hybrid architecture that unifies VLMs and WMs. In our design, the high-level VLM generates behavior commands to guide the driving WM, enabling interpretable and context-aware actions. We evaluate conditioning strategies and provide insights into the hybrid design challenges.
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Stefan Englmeier, Katharina Winter, Fabian B. Flohr. 2026-03-15. WorldVLM: Combining World Model Forecasting and Vision-Language Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14497
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