Point as Skeleton: Accumulated Point Cloud Enhanced Autoregressive Generation for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Simulation

Songbur Wong, Xiaosong Jia, Junqi You, Bo Zhang, Pei Xu, Renqiu Xia, Yuping Qiu, Shaofeng Zhang, Zelin Zhao, Xuechao Yan, Yuchen Zhou, Yurui Chen, Wen Guo, Hang Xu, Junchi Yan

Evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) remains challenging, as existing driving simulation methods often trade off closed-loop interactivity (e.g., CARLA) and real-world visual fidelity (e.g., nuScenes). We present \textbf{\emph{Point as Skeleton}}, a generative sensor simulation framework for state-updated autoregressive driving video generation, in which an autoregressive generator synthesizes visual observations from step-wise updated ego states, actor states, scene maps, and point-cloud skeleton conditions. To support closed-loop rollout, we introduce Reset-and-Roll, which adapts rolling diffusion inference to simulation by preventing future-conditioned latent states from being committed across simulation steps. To stabilize error accumulation during step-wise autoregressive rollout, we introduce point-cloud skeletons that decouple foreground and background assets and project them into camera-view painted-point and template-depth conditions, providing appearance and geometric cues. We further implement a nuPlan-based renderer-level closed-loop generative interface for evaluating generation under ego deviations from the original log. Experiments on nuScenes and nuPlan show that \textit{Point as Skeleton} improves autoregressive generation quality during closed-loop rollout, demonstrating its potential for visually faithful closed-loop driving simulation. The code is available at https://github.com/krauwu/point-as-skeleton.