PhyCo: Learning Controllable Physical Priors for Generative Motion

Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation. Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions. We attribute this gap to two missing pieces: large-scale, fine-grained physical parameterization, and model designs that correctly bind physical attributes to instances and emphasize dynamics over appearance. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyParam-Dataset, an interaction-centric collection of 130K physically simulated videos with dense physical parameterization, including force vectors, object material properties, and environmental constants across five representative rigid-body motion types. Built on this data, we present PhyParam, a physics-guided image-to-video diffusion model that conditions on object-level forces, masses, friction, restitution, and scene-level gravity via a lightweight physical-attention routing mechanism, and further improves motion learning with semantic-structural feature-space supervision. We also establish PhyParam-Bench, a benchmark for physical-law consistency in image-to-video generation, with a multi-level protocol evaluating temporal dynamics, spatial stability, and semantic--physical alignment. Experiments show that PhyParam improves physical consistency while maintaining high visual fidelity, advancing explicit rigid-body physical-parameter control for image-to-video generation. We will publicly release the dataset, benchmark, and code to support future research.

While recent video generation models have achieved significant visual fidelity, they often suffer from the lack of explicit physical controllability and plausibility. To address this, some recent studies attempted to guide the video generation with physics-based rendering. However, these methods face inherent challenges in accurately modeling complex physical properties and effectively control ling the resulting physical behavior over extended temporal sequences. In this work, we introduce PhysChoreo, a novel framework that can generate videos with diverse controllability and physical realism from a single image. Our method consists of two stages: first, it estimates the static initial physical properties of all objects in the image through part-aware physical property reconstruction. Then, through temporally instructed and physically editable simulation, it synthesizes high-quality videos with rich dynamic behaviors and physical realism. Experimental results show that PhysChoreo can generate videos with rich behaviors and physical realism, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics.

Recent advances in 3D content generation have amplified demand for dynamic models that are both visually realistic and physically consistent. However, state-of-the-art video diffusion models frequently produce implausible results such as momentum violations and object interpenetrations. Existing physics-aware approaches often rely on task-specific fine-tuning or supervised data, which limits their scalability and applicability. To address the challenge, we present PhyMAGIC, a training-free framework that generates physically consistent motion from a single image. PhyMAGIC integrates a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model, confidence-guided reasoning via LLMs, and a differentiable physics simulator to produce 3D assets ready for downstream physical simulation without fine-tuning or manual supervision. By iteratively refining motion prompts using LLM-derived confidence scores and leveraging simulation feedback, PhyMAGIC steers generation toward physically consistent dynamics. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PhyMAGIC outperforms state-of-the-art video generators and physics-aware baselines, enhancing physical property inference and motion-text alignment while maintaining visual fidelity.