HorizonDrive: Self-Corrective Autoregressive World Model for Long-horizon Driving Simulation

Closed-loop driving simulation requires real-time interaction beyond short offline clips, pushing current driving world models toward autoregressive (AR) rollout. Existing AR distillation approaches typically rely on frame sinks or student-side degradation training. The former transfers poorly to driving due to fast ego-motion and rapid scene changes, while the latter remains bounded by the teacher's single-pass output length and thus provides only a limited supervision horizon. A natural question is: can the teacher itself be extended via AR rollout to provide unbounded-horizon supervision at bounded memory cost? The key difficulty is that a standard teacher drifts under its own predictions, contaminating the supervision it provides. Our key insight is to make the teacher rollout-capable, ensuring reliable supervision from its own AR rollouts. This is instantiated as HorizonDrive, an anti-drifting training-and-distillation framework for AR driving simulation. First, scheduled rollout recovery (SRR) trains the base model to reconstruct ground-truth future clips from prediction-corrupted histories, yielding a teacher that remains stable across long AR rollouts. Second, the rollout-capable teacher is extended via AR rollout, providing long-horizon distribution-matching supervision under bounded memory, while a short-window student aligns to it with teacher rollout DMD (TRD) for efficient real-time deployment. HorizonDrive natively supports minute-scale AR rollout under bounded memory; on nuScenes, HorizonDrive reduces FID by 52% and FVD by 37%, and lowers ARE and DTW by 21% and 9% relative to the strongest long-horizon streaming baselines, while remaining competitive with single-pass driving video generators.

Driving with DINO: Vision Foundation Features as a Unified Bridge for Sim-to-Real Generation in Autonomous Driving

Driven by the emergence of Controllable Video Diffusion, existing Sim2Real methods for autonomous driving video generation typically rely on explicit intermediate representations to bridge the domain gap. However, these modalities face a fundamental Consistency-Realism Dilemma. Low-level signals (e.g., edges, blurred images) ensure precise control but compromise realism by "baking in" synthetic artifacts, whereas high-level priors (e.g., depth, semantics, HDMaps) facilitate photorealism but lack the structural detail required for consistent guidance. In this work, we present Driving with DINO (DwD), a novel framework that leverages Vision Foundation Module (VFM) features as a unified bridge between the simulation and real-world domains. We first identify that these features encode a spectrum of information, from high-level semantics to fine-grained structure. To effectively utilize this, we employ Principal Subspace Projection to discard the high-frequency elements responsible for "texture baking," while concurrently introducing Random Channel Tail Drop to mitigate the structural loss inherent in rigid dimensionality reduction, thereby reconciling realism with control consistency. Furthermore, to fully leverage DINOv3's high-resolution capabilities for enhancing control precision, we introduce a learnable Spatial Alignment Module that adapts these high-resolution features to the diffusion backbone. Finally, we propose a Causal Temporal Aggregator employing causal convolutions to explicitly preserve historical motion context when integrating frame-wise DINO features, which effectively mitigates motion blur and guarantees temporal stability. Project page: https://albertchen98.github.io/DwD-project/