DriveWAM: Video Generative Priors Enable Scalable World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28544v1
• Date: Wed, 27 May 2026 14:36:26 GMT
• Title: DriveWAM: Video Generative Priors Enable Scalable World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving
• Abstract summary: We present DriveWAM, a driving world-action model that adapts a pretrained video diffusion transformer into an autoregressive video-action policy.<n>DriveWAM organizes video and action streams into a unified temporal token sequence and trains them under a joint flow-matching objective.<n>Experiments on NAVSIM and the PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles benchmark show that DriveWAM achieves strong planning performance.
• Score: 19.231942908215174
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Pretrained foundation models have become an important basis for end-to-end autonomous driving. In contrast to vision-language models pretrained primarily on static image-text pairs, video generative models capture temporal dynamics and motion priors that are naturally suited for driving. We present DriveWAM, a driving world-action model that adapts a pretrained video diffusion transformer into an autoregressive video-action policy. DriveWAM organizes video and action streams into a unified temporal token sequence and trains them under a joint flow-matching objective, preserving the pretrained video-generation architecture while adapting its large-scale video priors to action generation. To incorporate high-level scene understanding, we introduce scene-evolving driving guidance, where a frozen VLM produces chunk-specific semantic intent to guide video-action generation. To keep long-horizon rollout bounded, we further introduce selective KV memory, which maintains bounded modality-aware video and action memory pools through relevance-redundancy cache selection at inference time. Experiments on NAVSIM and the PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles benchmark show that DriveWAM achieves strong planning performance, and a data-scaling study from 4k to 100k driving clips further confirms the scaling potential of world-action modeling for end-to-end autonomous driving.

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