LabWorld: Learning Interactive 4D Worlds for Scientific Experimentation
Authors: Suozhi Huang, Kelsey Fu, Binxu Li, Luna Lyu, Kaize Wu, Wenbo Lu, David Smerkous, Jiahan Li, Siqi Zhu, Zhizhou Sha, Jiacheng Guo, Zhixuan Liang, Shilong Liu, Le Cong, Mengdi Wang
Organizations: Princeton University · Stanford University · University of Chicago · New York University · Oregon State University · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · University of Texas at Austin
Autonomous scientific agents must not only reason about experiments but also interact with the physical environments in which they are executed. Existing laboratory simulators typically rely on manually constructed assets and predefined procedures, while laboratory videos capture real equipment, layouts, and interactions but leave this information implicit in pixels. We introduce LabWorld, an agent-driven Real2Sim framework for reconstructing interactive 4D laboratory worlds from monocular RGB video. LabWorld recovers reusable 3D assets, a metric scene, time-varying object states, and procedure events. Multi-frame observations provide complementary evidence for asset and scene reconstruction, while motion reconstruction combines visual and geometric observations with event constraints encoding the spatial and temporal requirements of laboratory interactions. We evaluate LabWorld on real pipetting and vortexing videos collected in our laboratory against general-purpose agentic and dedicated reconstruction baselines. For pipetting, LabWorld achieves a mean Mask IoU of 0.501, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.033. For vortexing, it achieves a mean Tube-Length-Normalized PCK-AUC of 0.638, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.035. On five pipetting videos, event-conditioned reconstruction increases the fraction of modeled physical constraints satisfied from 14.3% (5/35) to 100% (35/35). The resulting worlds expose geometry, motion, articulation, and events as explicit, editable state for replay, inspection, and future embodied scientific systems.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: From laboratory video to interactive 4D worlds. Each video is selected from the collection on the left. Source frames are paired with reconstructed views at matching video times t , measured in seconds. The enlarged scene overlays the same pipette, with matching colors linking its reconstructed states to the source frames. The lower panels illustrate video understanding, reusable asset generation, and potential uses in path planning and event editing. Object boxes and interaction arrows in the video-understanding panel are explanatory annotations. The planning and editing panels are conceptual illustrations rather than evaluated downstream results.
Method
Laboratory assets
Scene reconstruction
Motion reconstruction
Event-conditioned reconstruction
AutoBio ( Lan et al., 2026 )
✓
×
×
×
SafeLab ( Bai et al., 2026 )
✓
×
×
×
TableVerse ( Wang et al., 2026a )
×
✓
×
×
SimFoundry ( Ranawaka et al., 2026 )
×
✓
×
×
Agentic Real2Sim ( Chen et al., 2026a )
×
✓
✓
×
GPT-6 Astra
✓
✓
✓
×
Table 1: Capabilities of related methods and evaluated baselines. Columns denote reusable 3D assets, reconstruction of the observed scene and motion, and explicit procedure-level constraints during motion reconstruction. ✓ indicates a demonstrated capability under these definitions; × indicates that it is not demonstrated. For GPT-6 Astra, the entries describe the video-based reconstruction agent evaluated in this study rather than the underlying model in isolation. Its inputs and reconstruction procedure are described in Appendix G .
Figure 2: Overview of the LabWorld reconstruction pipeline. SAM3 provides visible object masks, while MapAnything estimates scene geometry from the source video. Observed equipment is represented by generated or reused assets and assembled into a shared 3D scene. An agent-generated event list specifies interaction types and time windows for motion reconstruction, which combines visual and geometric observations with temporal regularization and event constraints. The colored curve shows the reconstructed pipette-tip trajectory, with markers identifying selected times. Source-video and reconstruction crops support visual inspection of a beaker interaction, without independently establishing event completion.
Figure 3: Source-video and reconstruction comparison. Source frames (top) and LabWorld reconstructions (bottom) from pipetting video 108 are shown at matched times using the same tabletop crop. The columns show tool transport, tip-box interaction, and tube-rack interaction. Green boxes (Ref.) enclose SAM3 visible reference masks, while red boxes (3D) enclose rendered tool silhouettes projected through the fixed reconstruction camera. The overlays support comparison of projected position and extent, although occlusion can affect the visible reference masks. These selected frames illustrate reconstruction states rather than verify complete events or liquid transfer.
Method
Pipetting IoU ↑
Vortexing PCK-AUC ↑
GPT-6 Astra
0.156
0.479
FoundationPose
0.026
0.232
Do as I Do
0.468
0.603
LabWorld
0.501
0.638
Table 2: Reconstruction accuracy across baselines. Pipetting is evaluated using mean Mask IoU and vortexing using Tube-Length–Normalized PCK-AUC. Higher is better.
Figure 4: Pipette reconstruction agreement under reduced visibility. (a) Mask IoU for higher-visibility ( v≥0.7 , n=503 ) and lower-visibility ( v<0.7 , n=144 ) observations across ten LabWorld reconstructions. Points denote observations, violins show their distributions, boxes indicate medians and interquartile ranges, and black diamonds mark pooled means (0.545 and 0.349). (b) Mask IoU versus the occlusion proxy o=1−v across all 647 observations. The red line shows the pooled linear fit with a pointwise 95% confidence interval from whole-video resampling. Pearson r=−0.347 and Spearman ρ=−0.070 show that the group-level difference does not correspond to a consistently monotonic relationship. Visibility is a prediction-dependent proxy, not a calibrated measure of physical occlusion.
Method
Mask IoU ↑
Physical constraints ↑
LabWorld
0.508
35/35
w/o event-conditioned reconstruction
0.572
5/35
Table 3: Ablation of event-conditioned reconstruction. Removing event constraints improves image-space Mask IoU but causes physical constraint satisfaction to collapse, demonstrating that visual agreement alone does not ensure a physically valid reconstruction. The complete component-wise ablation is reported in Appendix J .
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Event
Functional parts
Reconstruction constraint
Grasp
handle, hand
Object and hand motion become locally coupled, and the object is released from its previous support.
Transport
rigid object
Preserve object dimensions and orientation continuity while allowing free motion above the table.
Dispense
tool tip, opening
Enforce the required approach, entry, dwell, and withdrawal phases while retaining the observed tool axis.
Insert
tube axis, slot
Align axes, constrain lateral offset, and enforce a valid insertion depth without penetration.
Open/close
lid, hinge, base
Keep the base supported and restrict the lid to a revolute joint with fixed axis and joint limits.
Place
object support, surface
Reach support contact with low terminal velocity and remain non-penetrating after release.
Appendix
Table 4: Scientific events and the geometric relations they instantiate.
Method
Mask IoU ↑
Physical constraints ↑
LabWorld
0.508
35/35
w/o event-conditioned reconstruction
0.572
5/35
w/o temporal regularization
0.514
35/35
w/o depth-derived initialization
0.487
35/35
w/o iterative visual refinement
0.223
35/35
Appendix
Table 5: Complete component-wise ablation of LabWorld . Mask IoU measures image-space agreement, while physical constraints measure satisfaction of the modeled experimental interaction geometry. Event conditioning is required for physical validity despite higher IoU without it, while the remaining ablations characterize complementary contributions to visual accuracy and trajectory coherence.
Existing approaches for robot learning in simulation often require substantial manual effort to construct scenes and specify tasks, limiting training scalability and data diversity. Meanwhile, in-the-wild robot demonstrations naturally provide diverse and realistic observations of real-world interactions. Leveraging these demonstrations for simulation requires both high-fidelity visual reconstruction and physically consistent interactions. General-purpose agents offer flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios and strong reasoning about 3D spatial relationships, while specialized generative models provide high-fidelity reconstruction of scene appearance and geometry. We introduce WorldMirror, an agentic real-to-sim framework that constructs interactive digital twins from in-the-wild robot demonstrations. Our central idea is to formulate real-to-sim construction as the iterative refinement of an executable world program. A coding agent decomposes the observed scene, plans reconstruction steps, and orchestrates specialized image and 3D generation tools, refining the program through verification feedback. A camera-pose-anchored scene representation organizes the world into static visual context, support geometry, and editable interactive assets while preserving spatial relationships among the scene, objects, and robot. The agent uses this representation to diagnose and correct reconstruction errors, enabling physically consistent interaction and trajectory replay. Experiments on DROID demonstrate that WorldMirror can reconstruct visually faithful and geometrically consistent interactive worlds while preserving the physical validity of recorded robot trajectories.
Tianling Xu, Weijie Wan, Honghao Su +9
Xspark AI · University College London · Tsinghua University +2
Visual captures provide detailed scene appearance, but converting them into interactive simulation environments requires object reconstruction, physical modeling, and correction of intermediate errors. We present SceneAgent, an agentic pipeline that coordinates these steps through simulator-based visual inspection and repair. The pipeline processes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), photogrammetry, LiDAR captures, AI-generated 3DGS scenes, and 4D videos of dynamic scenes, and combines object segmentation, physical parameter estimation, part decomposition, articulation, and deformable simulation. To support policy learning, SceneAgent generates diverse object variants ("digital sisters") and scripted demonstrations. On a cluttered bin scene from GraspClutter6D, SceneAgent raises F1 at 1 cm for every coding agent with scorable outputs both with and without its skills, and its reconstructions are better than SimFoundry: all agent configurations exceed SimFoundry's F1 score, with a best of 60.75% versus 6.9%. On three dynamic scenes from 4DCodeBench, SceneAgent raises the mean dynamic IoU of Gemini 4 Argon from 0.86% to 99.09%. We further demonstrate diverse simulated interactions and preliminary policy transfer to a real robot.
Luke Hollis, Tianxing Fan, Heng Yang
Computational Robotics Group, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Building interactive simulators from real-world observations is a promising way to scale embodied data, but current pipelines still rely heavily on manual environment construction and calibration. We study whether frontier foundation models and coding agents can automate this process end to end. We formulate autonomous video-to-simulation as a software engineering task in which an agent observes an embodied video, constructs the corresponding simulated environment and robot behavior, and iteratively refines the result through execution feedback. To evaluate this capability, we introduce Video2World, a benchmark comprising 222 reconstruction instances derived from 189 robot and human demonstration videos. Video2World measures reconstructed worlds along geometric fidelity, dynamic fidelity, and functional correctness, capturing spatial perception, physical reasoning, and executable interaction. Evaluating 9 frontier coding-agent systems reveals a sharp improvement in Task success beginning with Claude Opus 5, rising from below 5% to over 15%, while substantial gaps to human-assisted reconstruction remain. We further find that worlds that look better could work worse: better visual fidelity does not always lead to higher task success. This echoes the broader gap between perceptual realism and factual correctness observed in generative models.