MBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Memory Capability for Video World Models
Authors: Shengjun Zhang, Zhang Zhang, Simin Huang, Zhenyu Tang, Hanyang Wang, Chensheng Dai, Min Chen, Yifan Li, +6 more
Organizations: 1Tsinghua University · 2WeChat Vision, Tecent Inc. · 3Peking University
Abstract
Recent advancements in video-based world models have demonstrated an unprecedented ability to synthesize high-fidelity visual sequences. However, a fundamental gap persists between visually plausible video generation and the functional requirements of a world model, particularly in maintaining a stable and reasonable internal state over extended temporal horizons. While existing benchmarks primarily emphasize visual quality, motion coherence, and text-video alignment, they largely overlook memory, the core capability of a world model to preserve consistency across long-term horizons and complex interactions. To address this gap, we present \textbf{MBench}, a comprehensive benchmark dedicated to quantifying and evaluating the memory capability of video world models. We systematically decompose the memory capability of video world models into three hierarchical and complementary core dimensions: entity consistency, environment consistency, and causal consistency, which are further refined into 12 quantifiable sub-dimensions for comprehensive characterization of long-term memory. Our benchmark is built upon rigorously curated real-captured long videos, and evaluated by rule-based quantitative matrices and VLM to enable objective and comprehensive consistency assessment. Extensive evaluations of mainstream state-of-the-art video world models reveal critical systemic limitations of existing methods in long-term state retention, providing a standardized benchmark and clear research direction to advance the field.
Video world models simulate future states conditioned on current observations and user actions. Recent systems have demonstrated impressive video consistency and action controllability over long sequences. However, fairly comparing these interactive models remains challenging. In practice, a human player typically evaluates a world model by pursuing long-horizon objectives through interaction. For example, a user may turn around 360 degrees to see whether the environment remains consistent, or walk into the water and inspect whether realistic water ripples are generated. The action sequence required to achieve the same objective may vary substantially between models, making fixed action-conditioned evaluation unsuitable for cross-model comparison. To address this, we employ multi-modal Agent Players to interact with world models toward specified long-horizon objectives. Building on this paradigm, we introduce PlayWorld, a benchmark providing 171 scenarios, each with a specified objective. To evaluate performance thoroughly, we assess models along four core dimensions: geometry consistency, interaction fidelity, out-of-sight evolution, and insight evolution. In addition, we incorporate basic ability metrics for video quality and controllability. Experiments across nine state-of-the-art world models reveal that current models remain unreliable on long-horizon interactive objectives, particularly in maintaining spatial consistency and persistent state evolution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kxding/PlayWorld.
Video generation models aspire to simulate dynamic environments, and several benchmarks now evaluate memory consistency across frames. However, most assess consistency only while the target remains in view, and the few that force objects out of view evaluate static scenes where nothing changes during occlusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce MemoBench, a diagnostic benchmark built around the disappear-and-reappear paradigm in dynamically changing environments: a target object undergoes a physical process, disappears from view, and must be correctly recovered in its updated state upon reappearance. We curate 360 ground-truth clips spanning synthetic and real-world scenes, and design an evaluation suite combining automated metrics with VQA-based assessment across four diagnostic pillars. Evaluation of eight state-of-the-art models reveals key insights and open challenges regarding memory consistency under the disappear-and-reappear paradigm.
Recent advances in video generative models have promoted rapid progress in controllable world models. However, maintaining fine-grained spatio-temporal consistency under long-horizon reasoning remains a key challenge. In this work, we move beyond explicit 3D memory and coarse frame-level implicit modeling, and propose a fine-grained, learnable, and scalable memory for consistent world generation. We first identify two fundamental limitations of naïve learnable memory architectures in long-horizon extrapolation, namely computational inefficiency and attention dispersion. Through a systematic analysis of attention dispersion, we propose DecMem, a decoupled memory architecture that employs Sparse Global Memory for efficient fine-grained access to global history and Anchored Local Memory for stable and high-quality extrapolation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DecMem significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. By ensuring precise and efficient long-term memory and achieving superior extrapolation capabilities, DecMem enables minute-level controllable long video generation with high fidelity and consistency.