{"ID":3083814,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-05T06:46:15.197025399Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-07T05:49:02.101151534Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06014","arxiv_id":"2606.06014","title":"PLAN-S: Bridging Planning with Latent Style Dynamics for Autonomous Driving World Models","abstract":"Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning. However, existing LWM-based planners usually generate trajectories directly from entangled latent representations. This compact latent-to-planner pathway lacks explicit modeling of risk, drivability, and diverse style preferences, making driving-style dynamics difficult to supervise, inspect, or modulate before a final trajectory is selected. We propose PLAN-S (PLANning with latent Style dynamics), a planner-facing bridge that addresses this compactness-controllability dilemma by decoding a style-conditioned, four-channel semantic cost map from the latent representation. The cost map is conditioned on ego state and driving style and is consumed up-stream of the planning decision through two host-side interfaces: attention-level fusion for regression planners and reward-level fusion for anchor-score planners. We validate PLAN-S on two architecturally distinct hosts, ResWorld on nuScenes and WoTE on NAVSIM, while keeping the host backbones frozen to isolate the contribution of the proposed bridge. On nuScenes, PLAN-S reduces L2 at every horizon over the baseline, with 0.55 m average L2 and a 42% relative reduction in the 3 s collision rate. On NAVSIM, the rule-cost variant reaches 89.4 Predictive Driver Model Score (PDMS), while the learned cost variant provides complementary gains on baseline-challenging scenes. Ablations show that the cost pathway contributes most directly to safer trajectory selection. Qualitative results further show that PLAN-S can produce diverse cost maps, with spatially consistent variations aligned to different driving styles.","short_abstract":"Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning. However, existing LWM-based planners usually generate trajectories directly from entangled latent representations. This compact latent-to-planner pathway lacks explicit modeling of r...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06014","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.06014v1","authors":"[\"Xiaoyun Qiu\",\"Jingtao He\",\"Yijie Chen\",\"Yusong Huang\",\"Haotian Wang\",\"Yixuan Wang\",\"Xinhu Zheng\"]","published":"2026-06-04T11:03:20Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\",\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}
