Results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling, and shows that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features.
Abstract
Existing autonomous-driving world models typically perform dense prediction of future videos, occupancy states, BEV representations, or agent motion. We argue that planning need not reconstruct the complete future world, but only focus on scene features that affect future ego action. Based on this perspective, we propose Auto-JEPA, an action-oriented latent world model that learns continuous future driving intent through joint-embedding prediction. Given visual observations, egomotion history, and navigation commands, Auto-JEPA predicts an intent embedding aligned with the latent representation of the future ego trajectory. The predicted intent retrieves executable trajectories from a fixed trajectory memory, which are then ranked by a scene-conditioned candidate selection module. Auto-JEPA keeps the visual encoder frozen, requires no explicit perception annotations, and uses no learned trajectory generator. By optimizing only task-specific modules for trajectory representation, intent prediction, and candidate selection, Auto-JEPA achieves 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 89.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2. Semantic occlusion experiments show that masking dynamic-agent regions induces an average intent change 2.97x that of equal-area random masking. Moreover, occluding vehicles that affect future driving substantially changes the predicted intent and selected trajectory, whereas both remain essentially unchanged when non-influential vehicles are occluded. These results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling.
DA-WAM is proposed, a framework that unifies predictive representation learning, action-conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring under a single decision-making objective and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2.
Ruiguo Zhong, Benshan Ma, Xiaolong Chen et al.· 0 citations
Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) learns powerful spatiotemporal representations from video through self-supervised latent feature prediction. However, V-JEPA is built around random-mask completion and deterministic regression, making it fundamentally ill-suited for autonomous driving planning that demands future-directed prediction tightly coupled with action. To address this, we rethink the V-JEPA paradigm and present WA-JEPA, a V-JEPA-native world-action model designed for autonomous driving planning. Instead of random spatiotemporal masking, WA-JEPA employs hybrid future-masked pre-training, where the model infers future latents from observed context. Departing from deterministic regression, we recast future prediction as conditional flow matching over latent futures, which substantially improves the model's ability to generate plausible future latents for downstream planning. Finally, a joint future-action predictor is proposed to denoise future scene tokens and ego trajectories together in a unified spatiotemporal latent space, allowing action supervision to directly shape planning-relevant world representations. Pre-trained on nuPlan videos and fine-tuned on NAVSIM, WA-JEPA reaches 91.7 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v2, surpassing the strongest end-to-end and world-action baselines by 1.6 and 1.3 EPDMS, and, without HUGSIM-specific fine-tuning, attains the best HD-Score of 0.4462 on the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark under the same evaluation protocol. These results validate V-JEPA-native world-action modeling as a powerful and scalable paradigm for autonomous driving planning. Code is available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/WA-JEPA.
Xin-Lin Wang, Yu Xiang, Yuheng Zhou et al.· 0 citations
Active exploration and semantic navigation require an embodied agent to build memory from partial observations, predict how the evolution of observed spatial memory may support future motion, and convert that prediction into actionable plans. We present GLAM, a goal-conditioned latent world model trained over global spatiotemporal memory, and GLAM NAV, the complete navigation system built around it. Given historical map tokens, a navigation goal, and the current robot pose, GLAM jointly predicts future map representations and robot-centric waypoint latents, allowing future spatial context and navigation intent to be inferred in a shared representation space. The model follows a JEPA-like latent prediction paradigm, operates directly on map-level latent tokens rather than RGB reconstruction, and uses a pretrained waypoint encoder-decoder to supervise and decode navigation plans within GLAM NAV. Training data are collected by replaying ObjectNav expert trajectories in Habitat over HM3D v0.2 scene assets and slicing them into multi-timescale prediction samples. On a controlled HM3D-ObjectNav subset reproduction setting, GLAM NAV improves over a reproduced BSC-Nav baseline in both success rate and success weighted by path length.
I-Tak Ieong, Rui-Zhi Feng, Zhao-Yang Lu et al.· 0 citations
JEPA-WAM, a latent WAM built in a pretrained V-JEPA space, which couples latent transition prediction with continuous action generation through a shared predictor, predicts a spatially structured joint current-future target that captures task-shared visual temporal structure between current and future observations, while preserving dense patch-level correspondence.
Yihan Lin, Jiawei He, Shifeng Bao et al.· 2 citations
World models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving by predicting how traffic scenes may evolve and using such predictions to support action generation. However, existing approaches either separate future prediction from action generation or jointly predict them at the same temporal scale, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve long-horizon anticipation and responsive, observation-grounded decision making. We present Drive-HWM, a hierarchical slow--fast world modeling framework that organizes future representation prediction and action generation at complementary temporal scales. The slow world model predicts multi-step future representations to capture extended scene evolution. To explicitly model the abundant motion dynamics in driving environments, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Latents learned through optical-flow prediction. Guided by these future representations, the fast model uses a lightweight multimodal backbone and an autoregressive expert to jointly predict the next frame and the immediate action from the latest observation. Next-frame prediction encourages the fast model to capture imminent scene evolution, while one-step action generation allows decisions to be continuously updated as new observations arrive. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM v1 and v2 demonstrate the strong driving performance of Drive-HWM. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the hierarchical slow--fast design, dynamics-aware future representations, and joint next-frame and action prediction.
Zhao-Xin Fan, Tian-Bao Zhang, Wen-Jun Wu et al.· 0 citations
SimWAM, a simple yet effective WAM that leverages future-video prediction as a training-time supervision signal, co-trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert with joint flow matching and applies reinforcement learning to optimize a compositional driving reward beyond trajectory imitation.
