Causal Video Generation
Latest papers
21 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.
Autoregressive generation underlies real-time, causal video synthesis and is the backbone of video world models. Today's dominant approach distills a bidirectional diffusion model into a causal few-step student, but existing pipelines make this conversion prohibitively expensive, requiring offline Probability Flow ODE} (PF-ODE) trajectories that cost tens of thousands of GPU-hours and terabytes of storage. We show it can be made dramatically more efficient. Pushing this efficiency to its extreme, we reduce trajectory supervision to a single sample, the strictest setting possible, and find that it causes severe quality collapse. We trace this to the teacher's trajectory geometry: the high-noise regime, governing semantic layout and motion, and the low-noise regime, governing fine texture exhibit fundamentally different curvature and optimization behavior, so a single monolithic student cannot jointly fit both, causing severe representation interference. Motivated by this, we propose Glance Forcing, a lightweight distillation framework that decouples the denoising trajectory into two complementary slow and fast experts, each guided by a tailored, stage-specific objective, while keeping the pretrained teacher entirely frozen. This decoupling further reveals a general mechanism underlying few-step distillation: PF-ODE distillation mainly straightens the few-step trajectory geometry, while the subsequent distribution-matching stage independently governs distributional quality. Using only one PF-ODE trajectory, Glance Forcing already surpasses the fully-trained state-of-the-art baseline, raising the VBench Total score from 84.04 to 84.22 while cutting trajectory-collection cost from thousands of GPU-hours to about one A100-GPU-hour, with markedly larger gains in dynamic degree, VisionReward, and instruction-following, and consistent preference from human raters over strong baselines.
A Plausible Future Is Not a Causal Future: Can Video Models Generate How the World Unfolds?
Large-scale video generation models are increasingly viewed as a promising path toward world models, yet their ability to capture causally coherent physical dynamics remains poorly understood. Existing evaluations largely emphasize visual quality, prompt adherence, or broad physical plausibility, leaving open whether a model can faithfully realize a complete causal cascade, in which an initiating event propagates through causally dependent interactions to a terminal outcome. We introduce CausalCascade, a simulator-grounded benchmark centered on 50 event-rich Blender scenes with structured event graphs, graph-grounded diagnostic VQA, three levels of future-event specification, and 2,832 controlled counterfactual variants, and use it to evaluate nine image-to-video models with complementary motion-, event-, and counterfactual-level diagnostics. Across the evaluated models, generated motion is more reliably localized spatially than realized with correct spatiotemporal evolution, while richer future-event specification improves event recovery but leaves physical realization limited. Counterfactual evaluation further reveals weak selective responsiveness to physical interventions, while most audited failures are foundational, arising at scene consistency or event occurrence. Together, these results position causal cascade generation as a process-level test of world modeling and highlight the need to jointly recover the intended future, faithfully realize its physical evolution, selectively respond to physical interventions, and maintain a coherent physical world over time. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepDeltaLab/CausalCascade .
Conditional Residual Prediction: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion without a Bidirectional Teacher
Causal video diffusion models generate video autoregressively, which suits streaming, interactive, and long-video generation. Under standard training, however, they often yield lower generation quality than bidirectional models of the same size. Many existing approaches address this gap by initializing from or distilling a pretrained bidirectional teacher. We instead train a causal model from an image-model initialization, with no bidirectional video model at any stage. Because this path requires neither a large bidirectional teacher nor a complex distillation pipeline, it is simpler and more scalable. On this path, we find that a causal model trained on ground-truth history becomes strongly dependent on it, so that at inference errors in its own generated history propagate forward. We hypothesize that much of this dependence is unnecessary, because the current input already determines much of what the history provides. We propose Conditional Residual Prediction (CRP), a simple recipe for reducing a model's reliance on a condition: the model first predicts the target without the condition, and the condition may only add a residual on top of this prediction. Applied to history, CRP makes the model predict each chunk from the present as far as it can and use the past only for what the present cannot supply. In controlled experiments, CRP nearly closes the 6.14-point gap to a bidirectional model trained under the same setup. Scaling this recipe, we train Optica, a 2B-parameter causal video model that autoregressively generates 5-second 480p videos and reaches 82.78 on VBench with only about 15M training videos.
Custom Forcing: Training-Free Subject Customization for Autoregressive Video Generation
Autoregressive video models can generate minute-long videos in real time, but they produce generic subjects from text rather than specific subjects from user-provided images. Existing customization methods either require costly per-subject optimization or use pretrained conditioning networks that jointly process all video frames with bidirectional attention. Neither approach is designed for causal streaming. We present Custom Forcing, a training-free method that stores reference-based anchor frames in the persistent KV cache of a frozen autoregressive video model. However, fixed anchors face two limitations: simple conditioning allows identity to drift, and the text prompt continues to favor a generic subject. To address these problems, drift-adaptive value amplification (DVA) scales reference influence with the degree of identity drift, while anchor contrast guidance (ACG) steers generation away from the generic class prior. Over two-minute rollouts, fixed anchors fall from 0.58 to 0.42 in DINO-I, while Custom Forcing keeps it between 0.58 and 0.62 without reducing motion. Custom Forcing also achieves higher subject similarity than bidirectional customization methods and better preserves identity over 30s than causal image-to-video and reference-to-video models, while generating each frame 9.5-28.5 times faster than these long-video baselines.
Visualizing Distribution Coverage in Generative Diffusion Models
Diffusion distillation is widely adopted to accelerate sampling, and the resulting few-step models are broadly believed to match or even surpass their multi-step teachers in generation. However, standard evaluations such as GenEval2 typically draw only one sample per prompt, so improved scores may fail to reveal losses in distribution coverage. We therefore revisit whether distilled models truly match their teachers beyond single-draw performance using \textbf{pass@}, which measures the probability that at least one of independent samples satisfies a quality criterion. At , pass@ reduces to standard single-draw evaluation. As grows, the curve reveals whether additional draws find genuinely different successes or merely revisit the same modes, directly exposing how broadly a model covers the space of valid outputs. We first show that classifier-free guidance (CFG), whose quality--coverage tradeoff is well established, is the clearest case: higher guidance improves pass@, but its advantage shrinks and reverses at larger . Applying pass@ to few-step distilled models, we find the same tradeoff splits along training objectives: distribution-matching objectives concentrate the student's output distribution, boosting early-hit rates while eroding large-budget coverage, whereas consistency and trajectory-based objectives better preserve the teacher's coverage even at large . We further show that this tradeoff extends to few-step causal video generation. Our findings reveal a previously overlooked cost of diffusion distillation: across both image and video generation, the choice of training objective fundamentally determines whether a few-step model inherits its teacher's distribution coverage or trades it away for single-draw quality.
UnStep: Training-Free Acceleration of Causal Video Diffusion with Fewer Steps Than Distillation
Distilling bidirectional multi-step video diffusion transformers into few-step causal models has become a common approach for streaming video generation. While these few-step students are significantly faster than the teachers they are distilled from, they remain slow for real-time generation. In this work we present UnStep, a training-free wrapper that accelerates few-step causal video models at inference by running them with fewer diffusion transformer (DiT) steps than during distillation and limiting the temporal window retained in the attention KV cache. We propose two inference-only mechanisms to recover quality lost by step reduction and attention windowing: renoising the generated latent frames to a near-clean level and reusing the existing clean-cache pass to refine them, and applying truncated SVD to the DiT attention value and output projections. We also accelerate inference with a quality-preserving runtime stack for the DiT and VAE decoder, including more efficient attention calls and KV indexing, fused Triton RoPE with cached coefficients, and VAE decoding with optimized memory layout, precision, and convolution kernels. By reducing computation and optimizing the runtime stack, UnStep sets a new throughput regime for causal video diffusion, by running substantially faster than current methods, reaching 50 FPS on a single H100 without quality loss, and 77 FPS on GB200, all without retraining.
ViRDM: Taming Representation Distribution Matching for Few-Step Causal Video Generation
Few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion enables low-latency streaming generation, but existing post-training methods predominantly rely on Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), requiring both a large pretrained teacher and an online critic to estimate distributional discrepancies through diffusion scores. In this work, we ask whether this resource-intensive teacher--critic stack can be eliminated by post-training only the generator against a precomputed target distribution. Drawing inspiration from representation distribution matching (RDM) for one-step image generation, we systematically study its transfer to few-step causal video generation and identify three key barriers: a memory-intractable gradient path, a distinct video optimization regime, and representation distributions that underconstrain temporal dynamics. We introduce ViRDM, a teacher- and critic-free video post-training recipe that addresses these barriers sequentially. By coupling RDM with stochastically truncated clean-exit supervision, a lightweight VAE decoder, and staged vector--Jacobian products, ViRDM makes representation distribution matching memory-feasible for multi-step causal video rollouts. We further establish effective generated-population and initialization regimes for video RDM, and introduce lightweight dynamics regularization to compensate for the underconstrained temporal dynamics. ViRDM turns three-network distillation into generator-only post-training, reducing GPU memory use and training time while improving video quality. With only 20 generator updates, the recipe reaches 84.87 on the official VBench evaluation, outperforming the previous best few-step causal baseline by 0.36, while requiring 16 A100 GPU-hours. We additionally report exploratory results demonstrating the potential of the same recipe for lower causal sampling budget and for one-, two-, and four-step bidirectional generation.
Astronex-World 1.0: Real-Time Interactive World Model Foundation
We present Astronex-World 1.0, an open controllable video world-model foundation. Given a text prompt (text-to-video) or an initial observation (image-to-video), the model predicts future visual states under frame-aligned camera trajectories, continuous actions, and an embodiment identifier, and accepts text events inserted at a specified position of a rollout. The family provides a bidirectional model for full-context generation and a causal model with block-causal attention and cross-block KV caching for persistent generation, both built on the Wan2.2-TI2V-5B prior. PRoPE injects camera intrinsics and extrinsics, while a 64-dimensional action stream modulates every Transformer layer. A five-stage training path develops bidirectional camera and action control, converts the backbone to block-causal generation, distills a few-step student, restores mixed-domain dynamics, and applies asymmetric DMD/DMD2 distribution matching. The causal model generates 832x480 video at 24 fps. All five training stages run on two NVIDIA L20 48 GB GPUs, and the causal model streams in real time on one. It scores 73.5 on WBench Navi and 70.0 on WBench Full. On Full, this 5B model is above the 13.6B LongCat-Video and the 14B Helios, within one point of the 22B LTX-2.3, and above YUME 1.5, which is post-trained from the same 5B prior on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The reserved action input and output interfaces allow post-training for embodied intelligence and autonomous driving.
ForgeWM: Progressive Causal Training for Few-Step Action-Conditioned Video World Models
Action-conditioned video world models require low-latency causal generation and reliable responses to game-native controls. Although causal distillation enables one- or few-step video synthesis, extending it to interactive world models remains challenging, as discrete keyboard states and continuous mouse motion must remain aligned with temporally compressed latent chunks during causal training and autoregressive rollout. We introduce ForgeWM, a progressive framework that transforms a bidirectional action-conditioned video generator into efficient few-step world models through domain adaptation, teacher-forced causal training, causal consistency distillation, and on-policy distribution matching with a bidirectional teacher. The resulting budget-specialized students operate at steady-state denoising budgets of 1, 2, and 4 steps. ForgeWM further supports a dual-path deployment protocol combining latency-critical interaction with optional replay-time refinement, where the one-step student re-noises and refines its saved draft. On paired Minecraft trajectories, ForgeWM leads the evaluated systems in Imaging Quality, reference-aligned motion-profile agreement, action-sign accuracy, and mouse-control accuracy, while achieving the lowest reference LPIPS; the same four-stage recipe transfers to gamepad-controlled FPS gameplay. Replay-time refinement matches four-step reference quality while remaining roughly three times closer to the experienced trajectory than regeneration from noise. These results demonstrate ForgeWM's effectiveness for controllable few-step video generation.
JoyAI-Video-Edit: Real-Time Open-Ended Video Editing with Autoregressive Diffusion
Real-time video editing requires low-latency causal generation with bounded computational resources while preserving source fidelity and long-term temporal consistency. We present JoyAI-Video-Edit, a 16B-parameter autoregressive diffusion framework for real-time, open-ended video editing without access to future frames or a predefined video duration. Our method combines chunk-wise autoregressive adaptation, Source-Anchored Distribution Matching Distillation (SA-DMD), and Long-Horizon Autoregressive Distillation to reduce train--inference mismatch, preserve source fidelity during two-step generation, and mitigate accumulated temporal drift. Extensive automatic and human evaluations show that JoyAI-Video-Edit substantially outperforms existing streaming editors and remains competitive with strong offline systems on both short and long videos. The complete system achieves end-to-end 720p video editing at approximately 30 FPS on a single Nvidia B200 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/jd-opensource/JoyAI-Video-Edit.
Thinking in Video: Can Video Generators Really Reason About the Real World?
Recent advances in world models and video generation have given rise to an emerging reasoning paradigm that leverages video generative models to simulate, predict, and reason about real-world dynamics. We redefine this paradigm as Thinking in Video, where video is not merely an output artifact but a medium for constructing, extending, and verifying causal thought. However, this promise remains unverified: convincing rollouts may reflect memorized appearances rather than causal understanding, while existing metrics separate perceptual fidelity from semantic logic. To evaluate whether video generators support such reasoning, we introduce the Causal-Generative Dual-Judge (CGDJ), auditing World Model Consistency from two perspectives. Explicit Causal Perception tests whether a generator reads a video scenario as a reasoning problem through spatio-temporal flattened visual question answering, while Implicit Generative Perception-Prediction Gap evaluates whether it renders the causal consequence as a consistent future video. Applying CGDJ to representative open- and closed-source generators reveals a clear Perception-Prediction Gap: open-source models produce plausible dynamics despite near-zero explicit causal perception, whereas advanced closed-source systems show stronger but still limited alignment between reasoning and generation. Further analysis exposes audio-visual misalignment, where models verbalize correct causal logic more reliably than they render it, challenging the "world simulator" narrative.
CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation
Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have significantly improved visual quality and short-term temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to produce videos with physically consistent and causally plausible dynamics, especially in scenarios involving long-horizon interactions. This limitation arises from the fact that video diffusion models primarily learn physical consistency implicitly, while vision-language models can directly model physical laws. Based on this idea, in this work, we propose CausalMotion, a training-free framework that injects explicit physical reasoning into video generation through structured intermediate representations. Our key idea is to decouple reasoning from generation by leveraging a vision-language model to decompose a text prompt into a sequence of causally consistent keyframes and object-centric motion trajectories. These representations are then aligned and integrated as soft constraints to guide a pretrained video diffusion model during inference. This design enables explicit modeling of object dynamics and causal transitions without requiring additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and temporal coherence, particularly in dynamics-intensive scenarios, while maintaining high perceptual video quality.
Next Forcing: Causal World Modeling with Multi-Chunk Prediction
Autoregressive video generation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for World Action Models (WAMs). However, existing approaches suffer from slow training convergence and limited converged accuracy, particularly at high frame rates, as the training supervision is confined to the current chunk without explicit signals about future dynamics; they also suffer from slow inference due to iterative video denoising. In this paper, we present Next Forcing, a multi-chunk prediction (MCP) framework for causal world modeling that enables faster training, higher accuracy, and accelerated inference. Inspired by multi-token prediction in large language models, Next Forcing introduces an MCP training objective that augments the main model with lightweight auxiliary MCP modules to simultaneously denoise video chunks at multiple future temporal horizons (next, next, next chunks). These MCP modules form a causal chain across prediction depths, where intermediate features fused from multiple layers of the main model are leveraged to predict future dynamics, allowing near-future predictions to inform farther-future ones and providing dense multi-scale temporal supervision back to the main model. During training, the MCP modules significantly accelerate convergence and improve converged accuracy, especially at high frame rates: at 50 fps, Next Forcing achieves a 93.1% relative improvement over LingBot-VA at 5k training steps and 2.3x faster convergence, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on the RoboTwin benchmark (94.1/93.5% on Clean/Random). At inference, the MCP modules can be retained to predict the next video chunk in parallel with the current one, achieving 2x inference acceleration. Next Forcing also demonstrates significant improvements on PhyWorld, a benchmark evaluating adherence to physical laws in video generation, and over 50% FVD reduction on general video pretraining.
Video-Mirai: Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models Need Foresight
Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, only asks each causal state to explain the present. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as the key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.
minWM: A Full-Stack Open-Source Framework for Real-Time Interactive Video World Models
Recent video diffusion foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality video generation, yet turning them into real-time interactive video world models remains challenging. Interactive world models require controllable, causal, and low-latency rollout, which in practice demands a full pipeline spanning data construction, controllable fine-tuning, autoregressive training, few-step distillation, and streaming inference. In this work, we present minWM, a full-stack open-source framework for building real-time interactive video world models. minWM provides an end-to-end pipeline that converts existing bidirectional T2V/TI2V video foundation models into camera-controllable few-step autoregressive world models. Specifically, minWM first fine-tunes a bidirectional video diffusion model with camera control, and then applies the Causal Forcing / Causal Forcing++ pipeline, including AR diffusion training, causal ODE or causal consistency distillation, and asymmetric DMD, to distill it into a few-step autoregressive generator for low-latency rollout. The framework is modular and architecture-extensible: we instantiate it on representative open backbones, including Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B and HY1.5-TI2V-8B, covering both cross-attention-based condition injection and MMDiT-style architectures. minWM also supports adapting existing video world models, such as HY-WorldPlay, to new data distributions, training recipes, and latency targets. Beyond releasing runnable scripts, checkpoints, documentation, and inference code, we provide practical ablations on camera trajectory quality, controllability training steps, and minimal batch-size requirements. We hope minWM serves as a reproducible and extensible recipe for building and adapting real-time interactive video world models. Project Page: https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM
One-Forcing: Towards Stable One-Step Autoregressive Video Generation
Recent advances in autoregressive diffusion-based video generation have substantially improved the quality of real-time video synthesis. However, most existing methods still require multiple denoising steps, while reducing sampling to a single step often leads to severe quality degradation: trajectory-based consistency distillation methods often produce videos with weak dynamics, whereas DMD-based methods, such as Self-Forcing, tend to generate blurry frames. We attribute this limitation to the teacher trajectories exhibiting highly concentrated curvature near the high-noise endpoint, which poses a fundamental geometric challenge for one-step distillation under the consistency distillation framework. To address these limitations, we propose One-Forcing, a simple yet effective approach that augments the DMD objective with an auxiliary GAN loss for high-quality and efficient one-step video generation. We further find that framewise autoregression stabilizes adversarial training, enabling higher-quality generation with substantially fewer training iterations than chunkwise autoregression. Experiments on VBench show that One-Forcing achieves a total score of 83.76, establishing state-of-the-art performance among one-step causal video generation methods while remaining competitive with strong multi-step approaches.
RAVEN: Real-time Autoregressive Video Extrapolation with Consistency-model GRPO
Causal autoregressive video diffusion models support real-time streaming generation by extrapolating future chunks from previously generated content. Distilling such generators from high-fidelity bidirectional teachers yields competitive few-step models, yet a persistent gap between the history distributions encountered during training and those arising at inference constrains generation quality over long horizons. We introduce the Real-time Autoregressive Video Extrapolation Network (RAVEN), a training-time test framework that repacks each self rollout into an interleaved sequence of clean historical endpoints and noisy denoising states. This formulation aligns training attention with inference-time extrapolation and allows downstream chunk losses to supervise the history representations on which future predictions depend. We further propose Consistency-model Group Relative Policy Optimization (CM-GRPO), which reformulates a consistency sampling step as a conditional Gaussian transition and applies online Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly to this kernel, avoiding the Euler-Maruyama auxiliary process adopted in prior flow-model RL formulations. Experiments demonstrate that RAVEN surpasses recent causal video distillation baselines across quality, semantic, and dynamic degree evaluations, and that CM-GRPO provides further gains when combined with RAVEN.
Causal Forcing++: Scalable Few-Step Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation
Real-time interactive video generation requires low-latency, streaming, and controllable rollout. Existing autoregressive (AR) diffusion distillation methods have achieved strong results in the chunk-wise 4-step regime by distilling bidirectional base models into few-step AR students, but they remain limited by coarse response granularity and non-negligible sampling latency. In this paper, we study a more aggressive setting: frame-wise autoregression with only 1--2 sampling steps. In this regime, we identify the initialization of a few-step AR student as the key bottleneck: existing strategies are either target-misaligned, incapable of few-step generation, or too costly to scale. We propose Causal Forcing++, a principled and scalable pipeline that uses causal consistency distillation (causal CD) for few-step AR initialization. The core idea is that causal CD learns the same AR-conditional flow map as causal ODE distillation, but obtains supervision from a single online teacher ODE step between adjacent timesteps, avoiding the need to precompute and store full PF-ODE trajectories. This makes the initialization both more efficient and easier to optimize. The resulting pipeline, \ours, surpasses the SOTA 4-step chunk-wise Causal Forcing under the frame-wise 2-step setting by 0.1 in VBench Total, 0.3 in VBench Quality, and 0.335 in VisionReward, while reducing first-frame latency by 50% and Stage 2 training cost by \sim$$4\times. We further extend the pipeline to action-conditioned world model generation in the spirit of Genie3. Project Page: https://github.com/thu-ml/Causal-Forcing and https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM .
CausalCine: Real-Time Autoregressive Generation for Multi-Shot Video Narratives
Autoregressive video generation aims at real-time, open-ended synthesis. Yet, cinematic storytelling is not merely the endless extension of a single scene; it requires progressing through evolving events, viewpoint shifts, and discrete shot boundaries. Existing autoregressive models often struggle in this setting. Trained primarily for short-horizon continuation, they treat long sequences as extended single shots, inevitably suffering from motion stagnation and semantic drift during long rollouts. To bridge this gap, we introduce CausalCine, an interactive autoregressive framework that transforms multi-shot video generation into an online directing process. CausalCine generates causally across shot changes, accepts dynamic prompts on the fly, and reuses context without regenerating previous shots. To achieve this, we first train a causal base model on native multi-shot sequences to learn complex shot transitions prior to acceleration. We then propose Content-Aware Memory Routing (CAMR), which dynamically retrieves historical KV entries according to attention-based relevance scores rather than temporal proximity, preserving cross-shot coherence under bounded active memory. Finally, we distill the causal base model into a few-step generator for real-time interactive generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalCine significantly outperforms autoregressive baselines and approaches the capability of bidirectional models while unlocking the streaming interactivity of causal generation. Demo available at https://yihao-meng.github.io/CausalCine/
MoRight: Motion Control Done Right
Generating motion-controlled videos--where user-specified actions drive physically plausible scene dynamics under freely chosen viewpoints--demands two capabilities: (1) disentangled motion control, allowing users to separately control the object motion and adjust camera viewpoint; and (2) motion causality, ensuring that user-driven actions trigger coherent reactions from other objects rather than merely displacing pixels. Existing methods fall short on both fronts: they entangle camera and object motion into a single tracking signal and treat motion as kinematic displacement without modeling causal relationships between object motion. We introduce MoRight, a unified framework that addresses both limitations through disentangled motion modeling. Object motion is specified in a canonical static-view and transferred to an arbitrary target camera viewpoint via temporal cross-view attention, enabling disentangled camera and object control. We further decompose motion into active (user-driven) and passive (consequence) components, training the model to learn motion causality from data. At inference, users can either supply active motion and MoRight predicts consequences (forward reasoning), or specify desired passive outcomes and MoRight recovers plausible driving actions (inverse reasoning), all while freely adjusting the camera viewpoint. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in generation quality, motion controllability, and interaction awareness.
Chain of Event-Centric Causal Thought for Physically Plausible Video Generation
Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) has emerged as a promising avenue for modeling real-world physical phenomena. PPVG requires an understanding of commonsense knowledge, which remains a challenge for video diffusion models. Current approaches leverage commonsense reasoning capability of large language models to embed physical concepts into prompts. However, generation models often render physical phenomena as a single moment defined by prompts, due to the lack of conditioning mechanisms for modeling causal progression. In this paper, we view PPVG as generating a sequence of causally connected and dynamically evolving events. To realize this paradigm, we design two key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes the physical phenomena described in prompts into multiple elementary event units, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning. To mitigate causal ambiguity, we embed physical formulas as constraints to impose deterministic causal dependencies during reasoning. (2) Transition-aware Cross-modal Prompting (TCP). To maintain continuity between events, this module transforms causal event units into temporally aligned vision-language prompts. It summarizes discrete event descriptions to obtain causally consistent narratives, while progressively synthesizing visual keyframes of individual events by interactive editing. Comprehensive experiments on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in generating physically plausible videos across diverse physical domains. Code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanWang0525/CoECT.