Semantic occupancy has emerged as a powerful representation in world models for its ability to capture rich spatial semantics. However, most existing occupancy world models rely on static and fixed embeddings or grids, which inherently limit the flexibility of perception. Moreover, their ``in-place classification" over grids exhibits a potential misalignment with the dynamic and continuous nature of real scenarios. In this paper, we propose SparseWorld, a novel 4D occupancy world model that is flexible, adaptive, and efficient, powered by sparse and dynamic queries. We propose a Range-Adaptive Perception module, in which learnable queries are modulated by the ego vehicle states and enriched with temporal-spatial associations to enable extended-range perception. To effectively capture the dynamics of the scene, we design a State-Conditioned Forecasting module, which replaces classification-based forecasting with regression-guided formulation, precisely aligning the dynamic queries with the continuity of the 4D environment. In addition, We specifically devise a Temporal-Aware Self-Scheduling training strategy to enable smooth and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance across perception, forecasting, and planning tasks. Comprehensive visualizations and ablation studies further validate the advantages of SparseWorld in terms of flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency.

Recent top-performing temporal 3D detectors based on Lidars have increasingly adopted region-based paradigms. They first generate coarse proposals, followed by encoding and fusing regional features. However, indiscriminate sampling and fusion often overlook the varying contributions of individual points and lead to exponentially increased complexity as the number of input frames grows. Moreover, arbitrary result-level concatenation limits the global information extraction. In this paper, we propose a Focal Token Acquring-and-Scaling Transformer (FASTer), which dynamically selects focal tokens and condenses token sequences in an adaptive and lightweight manner. Empha-sizing the contribution of individual tokens, we propose a simple but effective Adaptive Scaling mechanism to capture geometric contexts while sifting out focal points. Adaptively storing and processing only focal points in historical frames dramatically reduces the overall complexity. Furthermore, a novel Grouped Hierarchical Fusion strategy is proposed, progressively performing sequence scaling and Intra-Group Fusion operations to facilitate the exchange of global spatial and temporal information. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our FASTer significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors in both performance and efficiency while also exhibiting improved flexibility and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/MSunDYY/FASTer.git.

Multimodal 3D occupancy prediction has garnered significant attention for its potential in autonomous driving. However, most existing approaches are single-modality: camera-based methods lack depth information, while LiDAR-based methods struggle with occlusions. Current lightweight methods primarily rely on the Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS) pipeline, which suffers from inaccurate depth estimation and fails to fully exploit the geometric and semantic information of 3D LiDAR points. Therefore, we propose a novel multimodal occupancy prediction network called SDG-OCC, which incorporates a joint semantic and depth-guided view transformation coupled with a fusion-to-occupancy-driven active distillation. The enhanced view transformation constructs accurate depth distributions by integrating pixel semantics and co-point depth through diffusion and bilinear discretization. The fusion-to-occupancy-driven active distillation extracts rich semantic information from multimodal data and selectively transfers knowledge to image features based on LiDAR-identified regions. Finally, for optimal performance, we introduce SDG-Fusion, which uses fusion alone, and SDG-KL, which integrates both fusion and distillation for faster inference. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with real-time processing on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset and shows comparable performance on the more challenging SurroundOcc-nuScenes dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. The code will be released at https://github.com/DzpLab/SDGOCC.