Does Physics Live in the Activations? Localizing Physical Quantities in Video Diffusion Models
Authors: Jonas Kneifl, Jakub Skalski, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Kamil Deja
Organizations: IDEAS Research Institute, Warsaw, Poland · Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain · Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
Video generation models produce strikingly realistic sequences and are increasingly proposed as world models, yet recent benchmarks reveal pronounced deficits in their physical reasoning. This raises the question of whether these models internalize physical principles or merely reproduce familiar motion patterns. We address this by probing internal representations of video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for simulator-derived ground-truth physical quantities spanning kinematic motion and rigid-body dynamics under gravity and contact. We find that these quantities are linearly decodable with high accuracy early in the denoising process, substantially outperforming a baseline decoded directly from the model's own noised latents, indicating that the relevant physical information is actively constructed during denoising rather than already present in the input. Additionally, we show that activations at on-object tokens carry the relevant physical information and that quantities defined over multiple frames are readable from single latent frames. Hence, information is sharply localized within the token sequence and is computed globally but stored locally. The probes further show partial extrapolation, transferring to scene variations and object configurations outside their training regime, so what they read is not simply a correlate of the scenes they were fit on. When fitted directly in the full-resolution activation space, the probing directions can serve as steering vectors to change the model's output.
Video diffusion models generate or edit temporally coherent video by iteratively denoising latent sequences conditioned on text, images, motion, or other signals.
Modern video diffusion models generate increasingly realistic and temporally coherent videos, motivating their use as candidate world simulators. Yet it remains unclear whether these models internally encode physical structure, or merely reproduce motion patterns seen during training. We study this question by probing video diffusion models along latent trajectories corresponding to real videos with known physical plausibility. To obtain such trajectories, we approximately invert the deterministic sampling process by integrating the learned velocity field backward from a clean video latent to noise, giving access to the model's intermediate states and attention maps. Using these recovered trajectories, we show that physical plausibility is linearly decodable from diffusion transformer states across IntPhys and InfLevel, reaching around 81.27% average accuracy and outperforming dedicated representation-learning baselines such as V-JEPA and VideoMAE. Surprisingly, this signal is absent from the VAE latent input and emerges inside the denoising transformer itself, despite the model not being trained with a self-supervised predictive objective. These findings suggest that physically meaningful representations can arise as a byproduct of generative denoising.
Parsa Esmati, Somjit Nath, Katja Hofmann +3
University of Bristol · McGill University · Mila–Quebec AI Institute +2
Do video diffusion models encode signals predictive of physical plausibility? We probe intermediate denoising representations of pretrained Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and find that physically plausible and implausible videos are partially separable in mid-layer feature space, even at high noise levels. Within-source and perceptual-quality controls suggest that this signal is not fully explained by generator identity or generic visual quality. We distill the signal into a lightweight, backbone-specific physics verifier trained on frozen features and use it in two complementary inference-time mechanisms under a fixed multi-trajectory budget: progressive trajectory selection, which scores trajectories at intermediate checkpoints and prunes weak candidates early, and reward-gradient guidance, which steers surviving trajectories by backpropagating through only the first few DiT blocks. Experiments on PhyGenBench and Physics-IQ across CogVideoX-2B/5B and Wan 2.1-14B show that progressive selection matches verifier-based Best-of-4 on CogVideoX-2B while reducing wall-clock inference time by 37%, whereas reward-gradient guidance substantially improves physical consistency on CogVideoX-5B, all without fine-tuning the video generator.
Chujun Tang, Lei Zhong, Fangqiang Ding
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Brown University · University of Edinburgh
Despite impressive visual quality, state-of-the-art video diffusion models often generate content that violates real-world physical laws. While existing solutions rely on external priors or specialized data, we investigate the root cause by exploring the internal mechanisms of these models. Specifically, we present the first interpretability study on the ''motion planning'' process of text-to-video diffusion models, revealing how motion trajectories form during early denoising stages. Building upon the ''first shape, then details'' finding, we combine cross-attention trajectory patterns with causal head contributions to identify a specific subset of attention heads driving motion planning. Further, our self-attention analysis shows that Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) induces excessive spatial attention decay. This causes early candidate regions to prematurely lock into physically implausible positions, suppressing reasonable trajectories in adjacent frames and triggering generation failure modes. To address this fundamental flaw, we propose a lightweight architectural modification that scales the frequency of RoPE across different denoising steps. This strategy reduces excessive attention decay, helping the model explore better candidate regions to establish coherent physical motion. Finally, training-free and training-based experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing the physical commonsense of generated videos.
Yueyan Li, Haibo Wang, Caixia Yuan +1
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications