cs.CVOct 22, 2026

PhyEvolve: Multi-Agent State-Evolution Planning for Physics-Aware Video Generation

Authors: Yang-Hao Zhou, Lixing Tan, Zhiqi Li, Guang Yang, Xiao Yang

Organizations: Canva Research

Abstract

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have substantially improved visual fidelity, yet existing models still struggle to understand the physical evolution implicit in user prompts, making it difficult to generate videos with continuous physical state evolution. Here, we propose PhyEvolve, a multi-agent framework that enhances natural-language prompts through structured state-evolution planning. PhyEvolve consists of three agents: a Director, a Physical Evolver, and a Composer. Given a user prompt and an optional first frame, the Director grounds the scene and disentangles physical events from observation changes. The Physical Evolver uses scene evidence to identify physical mechanisms then constructs causally linked state transitions that unfold throughout the video, whether visible or not. The Composer utilizes these transitions to enhance the original prompts. Without retraining or model modification, PhyEvolve works directly with existing generators through prompt replacement. Extensive experiments on four major benchmarks show that PhyEvolve achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the cutting-edge prior agentic baseline by 7.9 percentage points on average. These results demonstrate that explicit causal state-evolution planning improves physical consistency and state continuity in generated videos through natural-language prompt enhancement.

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