CascadeOcc: Rethinking 3D Occupancy World Models with Cascaded VQ Representations

Understand

This letter proposes CascadeOcc, a novel occupancy world model that prioritizes intrinsic structural hierarchy over extrinsic auxiliary modalities for autonomous driving.

• Occupancy world models -- forecasting the future driving environment and planning the driving trajectory -- effectively bridge perception and planning, but current approaches often heavily rely on external modalities or large language models, failing to fully exploit the inherent structural potential of occupancy representations themselves.
• To enhance representational capacity for complex 3D scenes, we integrate a cascaded Vector Quantized (VQ) mechanism into an autoregressive framework.
• Following a coarse-to-fine principle, CascadeOcc progressively refines fine-grained details from global structures through a multi-scale architecture.