Delta-Triplane Transformers as Occupancy World Models
About
Occupancy World Models (OWMs) aim to predict future scenes via 3D voxelized representations of the environment to support intelligent motion planning. Existing approaches typically generate full future occupancy states from VAE-style latent encodings, which can be computationally expensive and redundant. We propose Delta-Triplane Transformers (DTT), a novel 4D OWM for autonomous driving, that introduces two key innovations: (1) a triplane based representation that encodes 3D occupancy more compactly than previous approaches, and (2) an incremental prediction strategy for OWM that models {\em changes} in occupancy rather than dealing with full states. The core insight is that changes in the compact 3D latent space are naturally sparser and easier to model, enabling higher accuracy with a lighter-weight architecture. Building on this representation, DTT extracts multi-scale motion features from historical data and iteratively predict future triplane deltas. These deltas are combined with past states to decode future occupancy and ego-motion trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DTT delivers a 1.44$\times$ speedup (26 FPS) over the state of the art, improves mean IoU to 30.85, and reduces the mean absolute planning error to 1.0 meters. Demo videos are provided in the supplementary material.