3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey
Abstract
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
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.07996,
title = {3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey},
author = {Lingdong Kong and Wesley Yang and Jianbiao Mei and Youquan Liu and Ao Liang and Dekai Zhu and Dongyue Lu and Wei Yin and Xiaotao Hu and Mingkai Jia and Junyuan Deng and Kaiwen Zhang and Yang Wu and Tianyi Yan and Shenyuan Gao and Song Wang and Linfeng Li and Liang Pan and Yong Liu and Jianke Zhu and Wei Tsang Ooi and Steven C. H. Hoi and Ziwei Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07996},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Survey; 50 pages, 10 figures, 14 tables; GitHub Repo at https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-3d-4d-world-models