Chen Shi*, Jinrui Xu*, Shaoshuai Shi, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Li Jiang†
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen & Voyager Research, Didi Chuxing
*Equal Contribution, †Corresponding Author
DriveWAM is a joint video generation and action prediction model for autonomous driving. It adapts a pretrained video diffusion transformer into an autoregressive video-action policy, organizing video and action streams into a unified temporal token sequence trained under a joint flow-matching objective — preserving video generation priors while extending the model to ego-motion action prediction.
Highlights
NavSim
Comparison on NAVSIM v1. *: results with imitation learning. †: trained with multiple trajectory anchors. MV: multi-view cameras; SV: single-view camera; L: LiDAR.
Method
Ref
Sensors
NC ↑
DAC ↑
TTC ↑
C. ↑
EP ↑
PDMS ↑
Human
–
–
100.0
100.0
100.0
99.9
87.5
94.8
UniAD
CVPR'23
MV
97.8
91.9
92.9
100.0
78.8
83.4
TransFuser
TPAMI'23
MV & L
97.7
92.8
92.8
100.0
79.2
84.0
PARA-Drive
CVPR'24
MV
97.9
92.4
93.0
99.8
79.3
84.0
LAW
ICLR'25
SV
96.4
95.4
88.7
99.9
81.7
84.6
DiffusionDrive
CVPR'25
MV & L
98.2
96.2
94.7
100.0
82.2
88.1
WoTE
ICCV'25
MV & L
98.5
96.8
94.4
99.9
81.9
88.3
VLA-based Methods
ReCogDrive*
ICLR'26
MV
98.1
94.7
94.2
100.0
80.9
86.5
DriveVLA-W0
ICLR'26
SV
98.7
96.2
95.5
100.0
82.2
88.4
AutoVLA
NeurIPS'25
MV
98.4
95.6
98.0
99.9
81.9
89.1
DriveDreamer-Policy
arXiv'26
MV
98.4
97.1
95.1
100.0
83.5
89.2
DriveVLA-W0†
ICLR'26
SV
98.7
99.1
95.3
99.3
83.3
90.2
WA-based Methods
Epona
ICCV'25
SV
97.9
95.1
93.8
99.9
80.4
86.2
WorldDrive
arXiv'26
SV
98.4
95.8
95.2
99.8
83.3
89.0
DriveWAM (Ours)
–
SV
98.3
98.1
95.2
100.0
84.3
90.1
PhysicalAI-AV
Comparison on PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles.
Method
Source
ADE@3s ↓
FDE@3s ↓
ADE@4s ↓
FDE@4s ↓
VaVAM
Valeo
2.31
4.32
-
-
Alpamayo-1.5
NVIDIA
0.80
2.31
1.44
4.18
DriveWAM (Ours)
—
0.47
1.35
0.83
2.47
Qualitative Results
Qualitative Results
Data Scaling
DriveWAM's action prediction error improves consistently as training data scales from 4k to 100k clips. Scene-evolving (SE) guidance provides complementary benefit at every scale.
# Clips
# Iters
SE Guidance
ADE@4s ↓
FDE@4s ↓
4k
50k
✗
1.21
3.65
4k
50k
✓
1.01
2.95
20k
50k
✗
0.95
2.94
20k
50k
✓
0.94
2.65
100k
50k
✗
0.92
2.75
100k
50k
✓
0.83
2.47
News
[Jun 7, 2026] We open-source all code and model weights.
[May 27, 2026] We release the paper and project page.
Getting Started
Installation
First, clone this repository and set up the environment.
DriveWAM trains and evaluates on two benchmarks. Prepare whichever you need.
NavSim
Follow the NavSim installation guide to download the nuPlan-based dataset and cache metric files, and export the environment variables from that guide (OPENSCENE_DATA_ROOT, NUPLAN_MAPS_ROOT, NUPLAN_MAP_VERSION). Then extract per-scene samples:
The raw dataset is hosted on Hugging Face and accessed through the physical_ai_av devkit. The devkit requires Python ≥ 3.11, so install it in a separate environment from drivewam:
pip install physical_ai_av
Accept the dataset license on the Hugging Face page, then download the dataset (or a subset of chunks) to ./data/physicalai. DriveWAM only needs the camera_front_wide_120fov camera plus the egomotion and calibration features. Extract 10 Hz clips from the download:
./data/physicalai/
├── clip_index.parquet # official train/test split; keep it even if you prune the raw chunks
└── front/
└── <clip_id>/
├── camera_front_wide_120fov.mp4
└── camera_front_wide_120fov_ego.pkl
VLM navigation prompts are used as conditioning during training and inference. We provide pregenerated prompts: training-split prompts are available on Hugging Face; the 1k-sample test-split prompts used for evaluation are included in the repo at src/physicalai/eval_data/prompts_test_sample_1k.json. To regenerate them yourself:
DriveWAM model checkpoints are available on Hugging Face. DriveWAM is trained on top of LingBot-VA Base, a pretrained autoregressive diffusion transformer. Download the base model weights before training.
Key training hyperparameters (see configs for full details):
Hyperparameter
NavSim / PhysicalAI
Training steps
50 000
Learning rate
1e-5
Optimizer
AdamW (β₁=0.9, β₂=0.95, wd=0.1)
Warmup steps
10
Batch size (per GPU)
1
Precision
bfloat16
Input resolution
256×448
SNR shift (video / action)
5.0 / 1.0
All experiments are conducted on 48 × NVIDIA H20 GPUs.
Edit the config (src/configs/navsim_cfg.py or src/configs/physicalai_cfg.py) to set your paths and hyperparameters, then launch with the matching script:
For PhysicalAI, we provide three CSV files listing clip IDs at different training data scales (4k / 20k / 100k clips), available on Hugging Face. Set the clip_csv field in src/configs/physicalai_cfg.py to the desired scale before training.
Evaluation
NavSim (PDM Score)
PDM score evaluation requires a metric cache — a set of per-scenario .pkl files that store precomputed map and route information to score each predicted trajectory. The precomputed metric cache for the navtest split is available for download on Hugging Face. To generate it yourself, run:
This writes one metric_cache.pkl per scenario token under ./data/navsim/metric_cache/. Pass the resulting directory to the evaluation script via --metric-cache-path.
1@article{shi2026drivewam,
2 title={DriveWAM: Video Generative Priors Enable Scalable World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving},
3 author={Shi, Chen and Xu, Jinrui and Shi, Shaoshuai and Sheng, Kehua and Zhang, Bo and Jiang, Li},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28544},
5 year={2026}
6}