LMGenDrive: Bridging Multimodal Understanding and Generative World Modeling for End-to-End Driving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shao, Hao, Wang, Letian, Zhou, Yang, Hu, Yuxuan, Zong, Zhuofan, Waslander, Steven L., Zhan, Wei, Li, Hongsheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Shao, Hao
Wang, Letian
Zhou, Yang
Hu, Yuxuan
Zong, Zhuofan
Waslander, Steven L.
Zhan, Wei
Li, Hongsheng
author_facet Shao, Hao
Wang, Letian
Zhou, Yang
Hu, Yuxuan
Zong, Zhuofan
Waslander, Steven L.
Zhan, Wei
Li, Hongsheng
contents Recent years have seen remarkable progress in autonomous driving, yet generalization to long-tail and open-world scenarios remains a major bottleneck for large-scale deployment. To address this challenge, some works use LLMs and VLMs for vision-language understanding and reasoning, enabling vehicles to interpret rare and safety-critical situations when generating actions. Others study generative world models to capture the spatio-temporal evolution of driving scenes, allowing agents to imagine possible futures before acting. Inspired by human intelligence, which unifies understanding and imagination, we explore a unified model for autonomous driving. We present LMGenDrive, the first framework that combines LLM-based multimodal understanding with generative world models for end-to-end closed-loop driving. Given multi-view camera inputs and natural-language instructions, LMGenDrive generates both future driving videos and control signals. This design provides complementary benefits: video prediction improves spatio-temporal scene modeling, while the LLM contributes strong semantic priors and instruction grounding from large-scale pretraining. We further propose a progressive three-stage training strategy, from vision pretraining to multi-step long-horizon driving, to improve stability and performance. LMGenDrive supports both low-latency online planning and autoregressive offline video generation. Experiments show that it significantly outperforms prior methods on challenging closed-loop benchmarks, with clear gains in instruction following, spatio-temporal understanding, and robustness to rare scenarios. These results suggest that unifying multimodal understanding and generation is a promising direction for more generalizable and robust embodied decision-making systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LMGenDrive: Bridging Multimodal Understanding and Generative World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
Shao, Hao
Wang, Letian
Zhou, Yang
Hu, Yuxuan
Zong, Zhuofan
Waslander, Steven L.
Zhan, Wei
Li, Hongsheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Recent years have seen remarkable progress in autonomous driving, yet generalization to long-tail and open-world scenarios remains a major bottleneck for large-scale deployment. To address this challenge, some works use LLMs and VLMs for vision-language understanding and reasoning, enabling vehicles to interpret rare and safety-critical situations when generating actions. Others study generative world models to capture the spatio-temporal evolution of driving scenes, allowing agents to imagine possible futures before acting. Inspired by human intelligence, which unifies understanding and imagination, we explore a unified model for autonomous driving. We present LMGenDrive, the first framework that combines LLM-based multimodal understanding with generative world models for end-to-end closed-loop driving. Given multi-view camera inputs and natural-language instructions, LMGenDrive generates both future driving videos and control signals. This design provides complementary benefits: video prediction improves spatio-temporal scene modeling, while the LLM contributes strong semantic priors and instruction grounding from large-scale pretraining. We further propose a progressive three-stage training strategy, from vision pretraining to multi-step long-horizon driving, to improve stability and performance. LMGenDrive supports both low-latency online planning and autoregressive offline video generation. Experiments show that it significantly outperforms prior methods on challenging closed-loop benchmarks, with clear gains in instruction following, spatio-temporal understanding, and robustness to rare scenarios. These results suggest that unifying multimodal understanding and generation is a promising direction for more generalizable and robust embodied decision-making systems.
title LMGenDrive: Bridging Multimodal Understanding and Generative World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08719