3DSPA: A 3D Semantic Point Autoencoder for Evaluating Video Realism
Organizations: University of California, San Diego, CA, USA · Vector Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada · University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Abstract
AI video generation is evolving rapidly. For video generators to be useful for applications ranging from robotics to film-making, they must consistently produce realistic videos. However, evaluating the realism of generated videos remains a largely manual process -- requiring human annotation or bespoke evaluation datasets which have restricted scope. Here we develop an automated evaluation framework for video realism which captures both semantics and coherent 3D structure and which does not require access to a reference video. Our method, 3DSPA, is a 3D spatiotemporal point autoencoder which integrates 3D point trajectories, depth cues, and DINO semantic features into a unified representation for video evaluation. 3DSPA models how objects move and what is happening in the scene, enabling robust assessments of realism, temporal consistency, and physical plausibility. Experiments show that 3DSPA reliably identifies videos which violate physical laws, is more sensitive to motion artifacts, and aligns more closely with human judgments of video quality and realism across multiple datasets. Our results demonstrate that enriching trajectory-based representations with 3D semantics offers a stronger foundation for benchmarking generative video models, and implicitly captures physical rule violations. The code and pretrained model weights will be available at https://github.com/TheProParadox/3dspa_code.
Figures & tables
| Method | Aria | DriveTrack | PStudio | Average | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TAPIR + ZD | 15.7 | 23.5 | 79.8 | 6.3 | 10.5 | 81.6 | 11.2 | 18.9 | 78.7 | 11.0 | 17.6 | 80.1 |
| CoTracker + ZD | 17.0 | 25.7 | 88.0 | 6.0 | 10.9 | 82.6 | 11.4 | 19.9 | 80.0 | 11.4 | 18.8 | 83.5 |
| BootsTAPIR + ZD | 11.8 | 16.3 | 86.7 | 6.4 | 10.9 | 85.3 | 11.6 | 19.6 | 82.6 | 11.6 | 18.9 | 84.9 |
| CoTracker3 + ZD | 15.6 | 24.1 | 88.6 | 13.3 | 19.6 | 86.8 | 9.0 | 13.6 | 83.9 | 12.6 | 19.1 | 86.4 |
| SpatialTracker | 16.7 | 25.7 | 89.3 | 6.9 | 12.4 | 83.7 | 12.3 | 21.6 | 78.5 | 12.0 | 19.9 | 83.8 |
| Model / Category | Permanence | Immutability | Continuity | Solidity | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed | Moving | Fixed | Moving | Fixed | Moving | Fixed | Moving | |
| GPT-4o ( Hurst et al., 2024 ) | 59.62 | 58.82 | 58.65 | 59.56 | 54.81 | 57.35 | 56.73 | 55.32 |
| Qwen-VL 2.5 ( Bai et al., 2025 ) | 53.85 | 54.41 | 56.73 | 53.68 | 52.88 | 54.41 | 50.96 | 51.06 |
| Gemini-1.5 Pro ( Team et al., 2024 ) | 55.77 | 55.88 | 56.73 | 56.73 | 54.80 | 54.80 | 56.73 | 56.73 |
| Gemini-2.5 Flash ( Comanici et al., 2025 ) | 64.42 | 58.82 | 59.62 | 63.97 | 54.81 | 55.15 | 55.77 | 56.38 |
| VideoMAEv2-g ( Wang et al., 2023 ) | 63.46 | 50.00 | 54.81 | 53.69 | 65.38 | 54.41 | 48.08 | 59.57 |
| Model | Spearman (PC) |
|---|---|
| Video Evaluation Models (fine-tuned) | |
| VideoCon–Physics | 0.48 |
| VideoCon | 0.13 |
| VideoLlava | 0.08 |
| VideoScore | 0.17 |
| VIDEOPHY–2–AUTOEVAL | 0.76 |
| Model | Visual Quality | T2V | Motion Quality | Consistency | Subjective Likeness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3DSPA (no 3D, no DINO) | 0.28 | 0.25 | 0.24 | 0.33 | 0.23 |
| 3DSPA (no 3D) | 0.31 | 0.44 | 0.41 | 0.39 | 0.46 |
| 3DSPA (no DINO) | 0.45 | 0.55 | 0.49 | 0.48 | 0.63 |
| 3DSPA (ours) | 0.48 | 0.58 | 0.55 | 0.60 | 0.60 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Component | Hyperparameter Value |
|---|---|
| Sinusoidal embedding (spatial + temporal + depth) | 32 frequencies |
| Track token projection dimensionality ( ) | 384 |
| DINO feature projection dimensionality | 768 |
| Depth feature projection dimensionality | 256 |
| Compression dimensionality | 96 |
| Up-projection dimensionality | 1280 |
| Transformer Name | Attention Type | QKV Size | Layers | Heads | MLP Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input 3D track transformer | SA | 3 | 8 | 1536 | |
| Perceiver-style transformer | CA | 4 | 8 | 2048 | |
| Up-projection latent transformer (decoder) | CA | 4 | 8 | 2048 | |
| Track readout transformer | CA | 4 | 8 | 1536 |
| Model | Inference Time (s) |
|---|---|
| VideoCon–Physics | 8.13 |
| VideoCon | 6.21 |
| VideoLLaVA | 13.52 |
| VideoScore | 4.89 |
| VIDEOPHY–2–AUTOEVAL | 10.67 |
| TRAJAN | 2.18 |
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