FactorJEPA: A New World Model for Crowded Urban Environments

Kapil Wanaskar · hf · 2026-08-08

Existing world models are typically evaluated on low-density, lane-structured settings and struggle with populous, chaotic urban environments. To bridge this gap, researchers introduced the DENSEWORLD regime and released a large-scale dataset comprising 1,000 hours of drive-through, walk-through, and aerial video across 22 cities.

The paper also proposes FactorJEPA. Instead of encoding the future in a monolithic latent space, this architecture decomposes scenes into layout, entities, and interactions using separated subspaces and a visibility gate to preserve partially observed agents. Experiments demonstrate improvements in predictive accuracy, causal sensitivity, and robustness, with method rankings replicating consistently across 2B and 1B V-JEPA 2.1 backbones.

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