Embodied video world models predict scene changes caused by robot actions, yet generated object responses may remain inconsistent with task intent and contact dynamics. Critical responses in embodied scenes often concentrate in local regions and specific time intervals. Inspired by chain-of-thought reasoning, we introduce ReactWorld, an embodied video generation model guided by structured interaction anticipation. In the generation backbone's feature space, an interaction response field predictor anticipates how the interaction will unfold, explicitly describing participant roles, future motion response intensity, and local motion changes. A response feedback adapter forms increments to object features from the difference between the object branch's outputs with predicted and zeroed local dynamics inputs. It also converts predicted displacements into positional biases for temporal attention. These two mechanisms guide object feature updates and information retrieval across frames, respectively. Through interaction anticipation and generative feedback, ReactWorld achieves an average score of 77.51 on RBench, outperforming PhysisForcing by 3.29 points with improvements in all nine categories. On EZS-Bench, it achieves a Domain score of 86.98 and an average score of 81.87.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of ReactWorld. Top: response prediction and generative feedback within each denoising forward pass. Bottom: (a) predicting roles, future responses, and interval dynamics to construct interaction context and local dynamic conditions; (b) extracting object-response increments relative to a zero-dynamics reference and updating features by role; and (c) converting gated, clipped displacements into positional biases within a fixed candidate window. Biases are added to query–key logits before softmax and feature aggregation, followed by bounded residual feedback. Scene and response visualizations illustrate the mechanism.
Figure 3: Structured response predictions and displacement biases. (a) The future response field referenced to the first frame, together with object roles, motion support, and displacement at frames 0, 56, and 76, overlaid on the corresponding RGB frames. (b) The same query and a shared 7×7 candidate window for the interval from frame 56 to 60, showing attention without displacement bias, the displacement bias, and attention with bias. Red and green circles indicate the query and displacement endpoint, respectively.
Method
Avg. ↑
Task category ↑
Robot morphology ↑
Manipulation
Spatial
Multi- entity
Long- horizon
Reasoning
Single arm
Dual arm
Quadruped
Humanoid
Wan2.2-A14B ∗ [ 22 ]
69.80
70.90
66.00
92.10
68.10
55.00
68.80
67.80
67.00
72.80
Cosmos3-Nano [ 17 ]
66.33
69.55
78.00
73.40
56.98
63.25
61.65
66.95
60.80
66.35
ABot-PhysWorld [ 9 ]
57.68
64.40
59.50
67.00
42.93
38.00
61.25
63.60
59.55
62.85
PhysisForcing [ 31 ]
74.21
75.65
80.00
94.20
74.73
78.13
67.75
67.60
60.85
69.00
Video-FT
71.94
73.50
71.50
91.90
70.80
63.80
68.20
68.40
66.90
72.50
Table 1: RBench category scores. ∗ denotes results from the official Qwen leaderboard.
Figure 4: Embodied task generation across methods. Columns show Wan2.2, Cosmos3-Nano, ABot-PhysWorld, PhysisForcing, and ReactWorld. Rows show stacking cups, dispensing jam, bagging apples, and opening an oven.
Method
Domain ↑
Quality ↑
Avg. ↑
Wan2.2-A14B [ 22 ]
77.42
76.89
77.16
Cosmos3-Nano [ 17 ]
84.32
75.60
79.96
ABot-PhysWorld [ 9 ]
83.66
76.94
80.30
PhysisForcing [ 31 ]
84.49
76.58
80.54
Video-FT
83.45
76.64
80.05
ReactWorld
86.98
76.75
81.87
Table 2: EZS-Bench196 results.
Method
Task progress ↑
Contact plausibility ↑
Visual quality ↑
Video-FT
3.74 ( p=0.063 )
3.24 ( p<0.001 )
3.92 ( p=0.211 )
PhysisForcing
3.70 ( p=0.006 )
3.78 ( p=0.140 )
4.16 ( p=0.749 )
ReactWorld
4.08
4.06
4.12
Table 3: Human evaluation. We report mean ratings on a five-point scale. Parentheses give Holm-adjusted p -values from paired t -tests against ReactWorld.
Variant
RBench
EZS-Bench
PSS ↑
TAC ↑
Domain ↑
Quality ↑
Video-FT
4.01
3.81
83.45
76.64
Heads-only
4.13
3.90
84.11
76.66
Heads+Adapter
4.24
4.12
84.73
76.69
Full w/o bias
4.37
4.15
85.38
76.71
Full (ReactWorld)
4.62
4.20
86.98
76.75
Table 4: Ablation of response supervision and generative feedback.
Variant
RBench
EZS-Bench
PSS ↑
TAC ↑
Domain ↑
Quality ↑
Full
4.62
4.20
86.98
76.75
Whole-entity context
4.31
4.14
84.85
76.71
No zero reference
4.43
4.12
85.12
76.68
Amplitude-matched
4.51
4.16
85.95
76.72
Table 5: Ablation of local responses and the zero-dynamics reference.
Figure 5: Directional interventions on feedback displacement. (a) Normal feedback. (b,c) Leftward and rightward offsets applied to the feedback displacement input shift the robot arm’s motion in the corresponding directions.
Figure 6: Displacement bias strength. Filled markers denote the default setting. A multiplier of zero disables positional bias while retaining object feature updates and content-based temporal attention.
Figure 7: Insertion depth. (a) Input image and PCA visualizations of backbone features at the same forward call and time position. (b) EZS-Bench Domain scores for different insertion blocks.
Current embodied video generation models primarily emphasize visual generative quality while overlooking physical fidelity, dynamic consistency, and task logic, especially for contact-rich manipulation tasks, which limits their applicability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce ReWorld, a framework aimed to employ reinforcement learning to align the video generation with physical realism, task completion capability, embodiment plausibility and visual quality. Specifically, we first construct a large-scale (~235K) video preference dataset and employ it to train a hierarchical reward model designed to capture multi-dimensional reward consistent with human preferences. We further propose a practical alignment algorithm that post-trains flow-based video generators using this reward through a computationally efficient PPO-style algorithm. Comprehensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that ReWorld significantly improves the physical fidelity, logical coherence, embodiment and visual quality of generated rollouts, outperforming previous methods.
Baorui Peng, Wenyao Zhang, Liang Xu +7
Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo · Georgia Institute of Technology · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +3
Video-based world models offer a powerful paradigm for embodied simulation and planning, yet state-of-the-art models often generate physically implausible manipulations - such as object penetration and anti-gravity motion - due to training on generic visual data and likelihood-based objectives that ignore physical laws. We present ABot-PhysWorld, a 14B Diffusion Transformer model that generates visually realistic, physically plausible, and action-controllable videos. Built on a curated dataset of three million manipulation clips with physics-aware annotation, it uses a novel DPO-based post-training framework with decoupled discriminators to suppress unphysical behaviors while preserving visual quality. A parallel context block enables precise spatial action injection for cross-embodiment control. To better evaluate generalization, we introduce EZSbench, the first training-independent embodied zero-shot benchmark combining real and synthetic unseen robot-task-scene combinations. It employs a decoupled protocol to separately assess physical realism and action alignment. ABot-PhysWorld achieves new state-of-the-art performance on PBench and EZSbench, surpassing Veo 3.1 and Sora v2 Pro in physical plausibility and trajectory consistency. We will release EZSbench to promote standardized evaluation in embodied video generation.
We tackle the challenge of building real-time interactive video worlds with user-defined behaviors. Such worlds must track object states, apply interaction rules, and render the resulting consequences as users act. Yet existing end-to-end video world models typically learn interaction dynamics within the generator, making it difficult to specify object-level rules and reason about their consequences. In this work, we introduce BoxWorld, which separates interaction reasoning from generative rendering. Given user-specified rules, a coding agent creates a Box World Engine that determines interaction outcomes and exposes the resulting object states through a lightweight interface of layout boxes, persistent object attributes, and dynamic status variables, leaving appearance and physical effects to generative rendering. A Box-State Generative Renderer then renders this evolving state stream into video autoregressively, enabling online control over object motion, state switches, and conditional events. Rendering this state stream is non-trivial: the renderer must respond to object-level state updates in real time while remaining coherent with the generated history. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training strategy that learns object grounding from open-domain videos and state transitions from gameplay videos, both annotated automatically, and finally performs rollout distillation on self-generated histories. We further propose PairedStateBench, a paired benchmark for fine-grained interaction control. BoxWorld substantially outperforms end-to-end world models and remains competitive across multiple public benchmarks. Project page: https://boxworld-web.github.io.
Zike Wu, Ahmed Hatem, Chintan Trivedi +4
University of British Columbia · Vector Institute for AI · Huawei Canada +1