Seeing the Future, Perceiving the Future: A Unified Driving World Model for Future Generation and Perception

Dingkang Liang1*, Dingyuan Zhang1*, Xin Zhou1*, Sifan Tu1, Tianrui Feng1, Xiaofan Li2, Yumeng Zhang2, Mingyang Du1, Xiao Tan2, Xiang Bai1
1Huazhong University of Science & Technology, 2Baidu,
* Equal contribution.

Abstract

We present UniFuture, a simple yet effective driving world model that seamlessly integrates future scene generation and perception within a single framework. Unlike existing models focusing solely on pixel-level future prediction or geometric reasoning, our approach jointly models future appearance (i.e., RGB image) and geometry (i.e., depth), ensuring coherent predictions. Specifically, during the training, we first introduce a Dual-Latent Sharing (DLS) scheme, which transfers image and depth sequence in a shared latent space, allowing both modalities to benefit from shared feature learning. Additionally, we propose a Multi-scale Latent Interaction (MLI) mechanism, which facilitates bidirectional refinement between image and depth features at multiple spatial scales, effectively enhancing geometry consistency and perceptual alignment. During testing, our UniFuture can easily predict high-consistency future image-depth pairs by only using the current image as input. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that UniFuture outperforms specialized models on future generation and perception tasks, highlighting the advantages of a unified, structurally-aware world model.

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Pipeline

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Demo

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Visualization

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Main Results

BibTeX


@article{liang2025UniFuture,
  title={Seeing the Future, Perceiving the Future: A Unified Driving World Model for Future Generation and Perception},
  author={Liang, Dingkang and Zhang, Dingyuan and Zhou, Xin and Tu, Sifan and Feng, Tianrui and Li, Xiaofan and Zhang, Yumeng and Du, Mingyang and Tan, Xiao and Bai, Xiang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13587},
  year={2025}
}