UniDrive-WM: Unified Understanding, Planning and Generation World Model For Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

UniDrive-WM introduces a unified vision-language model that jointly understands driving scenes, plans trajectories, and generates future images, significantly enhancing autonomous driving performance through integrated reasoning and prediction.

Contribution

It presents the first unified VLM-based world model for autonomous driving that combines scene understanding, trajectory planning, and future image generation in a single architecture.

Findings

Improves planning accuracy by 7.3% in L2 trajectory error.

Reduces collision rate by 10.4%.

Generates high-fidelity future images.

Abstract

World models have become central to autonomous driving, where accurate scene understanding and future prediction are crucial for safe control. Recent work has explored using vision-language models (VLMs) for planning, yet existing approaches typically treat perception, prediction, and planning as separate modules. We propose UniDrive-WM, a unified VLM-based world model that jointly performs driving-scene understanding, trajectory planning, and trajectory-conditioned future image generation within a single architecture. UniDrive-WM's trajectory planner predicts a future trajectory, which conditions a VLM-based image generator to produce plausible future frames. These predictions provide additional supervisory signals that enhance scene understanding and iteratively refine trajectory generation. We further compare discrete and continuous output representations for future image prediction, analyzing their influence on downstream driving performance. Experiments on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark show that UniDrive-WM produces high-fidelity future images and improves planning performance by 7.3% in L2 trajectory error and 10.4% in collision rate over the previous best method. These results demonstrate the advantages of tightly integrating VLM-driven reasoning, planning, and generative world modeling for autonomous driving. The project page is available at https://unidrive-wm.github.io/UniDrive-WM.