2025/09/04 by Lingdong Kong, Yang, Yu, Yu Yang +48 · 1 voice · 26 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Cornerstone #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Generative grammar #Open research #Point cloud #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization #Systematic review #Taxonomy (biology) #cs.CV #cs.RO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.07996
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/09/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
World modeling has become a cornerstone in AI research, enabling agents to understand, represent, and predict the dynamic environments they inhabit. While prior work largely emphasizes generative methods for 2D image and video data, they overlook the rapidly growing body of work that leverages native 3D and 4D representations such as RGB-D imagery, occupancy grids, and LiDAR point clouds for large-scale scene modeling. At the same time, the absence of a standardized definition and taxonomy for "world models" has led to fragmented and sometimes inconsistent claims in the literature. This survey addresses these gaps by presenting the first comprehensive review explicitly dedicated to 3D and 4D world modeling and generation. We establish precise definitions, introduce a structured taxonomy spanning video-based (VideoGen), occupancy-based (OccGen), and LiDAR-based (LiDARGen) approaches, and systematically summarize datasets and evaluation metrics tailored to 3D/4D settings. We further discuss practical applications, identify open challenges, and highlight promising research directions, aiming to provide a coherent and foundational reference for advancing the field. A systematic summary of existing literature is available at https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-3d-4d-world-models