Pengxuan Yang

Linbo Wang, Yupeng Zheng, Qiang Chen et al. · tsinghua

We introduce Latent-WAM, an efficient end-to-end autonomous driving framework that achieves strong trajectory planning through spatially-aware and dynamics-informed latent world representations. Existing world-model-based planners suffer from inadequately compressed representations, limited spatial understanding, and underutilized temporal dynamics, resulting in sub-optimal planning under constrained data and compute budgets. Latent-WAM addresses these limitations with two core modules: a Spatial-Aware Compressive World Encoder (SCWE) that distills geometric knowledge from a foundation model and compresses multi-view images into compact scene tokens via learnable queries, and a Dynamic Latent World Model (DLWM) that employs a causal Transformer to autoregressively predict future world status conditioned on historical visual and motion representations. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM v2 and HUGSIM demonstrate new state-of-the-art results: 89.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 and 28.9 HD-Score on HUGSIM, surpassing the best prior perception-free method by 3.2 EPDMS with significantly less training data and a compact 104M-parameter model.

Pengxuan Yang, Yupeng Zheng, Deheng Qian et al.

We introduce DreamerAD, the first latent world model framework that enables efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving by compressing diffusion sampling from 100 steps to 1 - achieving 80x speedup while maintaining visual interpretability. Training RL policies on real-world driving data incurs prohibitive costs and safety risks. While existing pixel-level diffusion world models enable safe imagination-based training, they suffer from multi-step diffusion inference latency (2s/frame) that prevents high-frequency RL interaction. Our approach leverages denoised latent features from video generation models through three key mechanisms: (1) shortcut forcing that reduces sampling complexity via recursive multi-resolution step compression, (2) an autoregressive dense reward model operating directly on latent representations for fine-grained credit assignment, and (3) Gaussian vocabulary sampling for GRPO that constrains exploration to physically plausible trajectories. DreamerAD achieves 87.7 EPDMS on NavSim v2, establishing state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating that latent-space RL is effective for autonomous driving.

Pengxuan Yang, Ben Lu, Zhongpu Xia et al.

Latent World Models enhance scene representation through temporal self-supervised learning, presenting a perception annotation-free paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, the reconstruction-oriented representation learning tangles perception with planning tasks, leading to suboptimal optimization for planning. To address this challenge, we propose WorldRFT, a planning-oriented latent world model framework that aligns scene representation learning with planning via a hierarchical planning decomposition and local-aware interactive refinement mechanism, augmented by reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RFT) to enhance safety-critical policy performance. Specifically, WorldRFT integrates a vision-geometry foundation model to improve 3D spatial awareness, employs hierarchical planning task decomposition to guide representation optimization, and utilizes local-aware iterative refinement to derive a planning-oriented driving policy. Furthermore, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which applies trajectory Gaussianization and collision-aware rewards to fine-tune the driving policy, yielding systematic improvements in safety. WorldRFT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks. On nuScenes, it reduces collision rates by 83% (0.30% -> 0.05%). On NavSim, using camera-only sensors input, it attains competitive performance with the LiDAR-based SOTA method DiffusionDrive (87.8 vs. 88.1 PDMS).