UniFuture: A 4D Driving World Model for Future Generation and Perception

Abstract

We present UniFuture, a unified 4D Driving World Model designed to simulate the dynamic evolution of the 3D physical world. Unlike existing driving world models that focus solely on 2D pixel-level video generation (lacking geometry) or static perception (lacking temporal dynamics), our approach bridges appearance and geometry to construct a holistic 4D representation. Specifically, we treat future RGB images and depth maps as coupled projections of the same 4D reality and model them jointly within a single framework. To achieve this, we introduce a Dual-Latent Sharing (DLS) scheme, which maps visual and geometric modalities into a shared spatio-temporal latent space, implicitly entangling texture with structure. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-scale Latent Interaction (MLI) mechanism, which enforces bidirectional consistency: geometry constrains visual synthesis to prevent structural hallucinations, while visual semantics refine geometric estimation. During inference, UniFuture can forecast high- fidelity, geometrically consistent 4D scene sequences (image- depth pairs) from a single current frame. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms specialized models in both future generation and geometry perception, highlighting the potential of unified 4D modeling for autonomous driving. The code is available at https://github.com/dk-liang/UniFuture.