Video World Models

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Overview

Video world models predict how scenes change over time, often in response to actions or camera movements, so agents can explore, plan, and test decisions in imagined environments. Common approaches use autoregressive or diffusion video generation, sometimes predicting compact visual features instead of pixels, and add action conditioning, 3D geometry, persistent memory, or explicit world states to improve control and consistency. Applications include robotic manipulation, autonomous driving, navigation, and interactive games, with evaluation increasingly testing physical dynamics, action following, memory, and downstream task performance alongside visual quality. A central challenge is that realistic-looking video does not necessarily preserve hidden state, obey physics, or support reliable long-horizon interaction, while richer simulation and memory can raise compute and latency costs.

Latest papers

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257 papers63 papers in the last four weeks, up 133% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

May 11, 2026

Is Your Driving World Model an All-Around Player?

Today's driving world models can generate remarkably realistic dash-cam videos, yet no single model excels universally. Some generate photorealistic textures but violate basic physics; others maintain geometric consistency but fail when subjected to closed-loop planning. This disconnect exposes a critical gap: the field evaluates how real generated worlds appear, but rarely whether they behave realistically. We introduce WorldLens, a unified benchmark that measures world-model fidelity across the full spectrum, from pixel quality and 4D geometry to closed-loop driving and human perceptual alignment, through five complementary aspects and 24 standardized dimensions. Our evaluation of six representative models reveals that no existing approach dominates across all axes: texture-rich models violate geometry, geometry-aware models lack behavioral fidelity, and even the strongest performers achieve only 2-3 out of 10 on human realism ratings. To bridge algorithmic metrics with human perception, we further contribute WorldLens-26K, a 26,808-entry human-annotated preference dataset pairing numerical scores with textual rationales, and WorldLens-Agent, a vision-language evaluator distilled from these judgments that enables scalable, explainable auto-assessment. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for assessing generated worlds not merely by visual appeal, but by physical and behavioral fidelity.

Lingdong Kong, Ao Liang, Tianyi Yan +20

NUS · UM · USTC +10

Autonomous Driving BenchmarksPhysical Consistency in Video GenerationWorld Models for Autonomous DrivingWorld Model EvaluationVideo World Models
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May 11, 2026

PhyGround: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in Generative World Models

Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/.

Juyi Lin, Arash Akbari, Yumei He +13

1Northeastern University · 2Tulane University · University of Washington +1

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationWorld Model EvaluationPhysical Reasoning in VideoVideo World ModelsVideo Generation Evaluation
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May 11, 2026

PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning

Modern action-conditioned video world models achieve strong short-horizon visual realism, yet remain unreliable on rare, interaction-critical transitions that dominate downstream planning and policy performance. Because passive demonstration data systematically under-samples these high-impact regimes, improving robustness requires actively eliciting model failures rather than relying on their natural occurrence. We introduce a KL-constrained adversarial curriculum in which a policy is trained to expose high-error trajectories of a diffusion-based world model while remaining close to the behavior distribution. The world model is continuously fine-tuned on these adversarially discovered trajectories, yielding an adversarial training loop that converts rare failures into a stable, near-distribution training signal without drifting into out-of-distribution exploitation. To maintain pressure on unresolved weaknesses as the model improves, we propose a Prioritized Adversarial Trajectory (PAT) buffer that re-ranks trajectories based on prediction error, action fidelity, and learning progress, focusing training on unresolved failure modes rather than repeatedly revisiting solved cases. We implement our approach in the MineRL framework and evaluate it on held-out out-of-distribution trajectories; PROWL improves robustness over models trained on passive data alone, reveals reward-hacking behaviors under weak behavioral constraints, and demonstrates that effective adversarial world-model training critically depends on balancing exploratory failure discovery with explicit behavioral regularization. Our results suggest that scalable world models benefit not only from larger datasets, but also from selectively generating informative training data.

Ahmet H. Güzel, Jenny Seidenschwarz, Benjamin Graham +3

University College London AI Centre · Odyssey · University of Basel

Adversarial TrainingWorld Model LearningAdversarial RobustnessAction-Conditioned World ModelsVideo World Models
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May 11, 2026

Network-Efficient World Model Token Streaming

Generative driving world models rely on compact latent state representations that must be efficiently transmitted and synchronized across distributed compute and connected vehicles. We study network-efficient streaming of a discrete world model state, where a stride-16 VQ-U-Net tokenizer (codebook size 8,192) maps each 288x512 frame to an 18x32 grid of token IDs (576 tokens/frame), equivalent to 936 bytes/frame under fixed-length coding. We consider a keyframe--delta protocol under strict per-message payload budgets and packet loss, and propose a fully online, label-free algorithm that prioritizes delta updates via cosine distance in codebook embedding space and triggers keyframes adaptively using a Hamming-drift threshold. The adaptive algorithm consistently improves the rate distortion frontier over periodic keyframes at matched bitrates: at 0.024 Mb/s (200-byte budget) dynamic-only embedding distortion drops from 0.0712 to 0.0661 (7.2%), and at 0.036 Mb/s (400-byte budget) from 0.0427 to 0.0407 (4.8%). Under 10% delta packet loss at 200 bytes, dynamic-only distortion is 0.0757 versus 0.0789 for a matched periodic baseline. To connect state fidelity to world model usefulness, we train a lightweight next-token predictor and evaluate perplexity conditioned on streamed receiver states: at 0.024 Mb/s, dynamic-position perplexity improves from 206.0 to 193.1 (6.3%), and at 0.036 Mb/s from 158.9 to 155.6 (2.1%). These results support discrete token-state streaming as a practical systems layer for bandwidth-aware synchronization and improved downstream token-dynamics utility under vehicular networking constraints.

Shatadal Mishra, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Nejib Ammar

InfoTech Labs, Toyota Motor North America R&D, Mountain View, CA, USA

Intelligent Transportation SystemsWorld ModelsWorld Models for Autonomous DrivingVisual Token CompressionVideo World ModelsStreaming Algorithms
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May 8, 2026

Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action

World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as Residual Latent Action (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose RLA World Model (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless videos, and improves VLA on LIBERO and real robot. The second one is a visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm

Xinyu Zhang, Zhengtong Xu, Yutian Tao +3

Rutgers University · Purdue University · University of Wisconsin-Madison

Latent Action LearningWorld Model LearningAction-Conditioned World ModelsVisual RLVideo World Models
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May 7, 2026

Render, Don't Decode: Weight-Space World Models with Latent Structural Disentanglement

Training world models on vast quantities of unlabelled videos is a critical step toward fully autonomous intelligence. However, the prevailing paradigm of encoding raw pixels into opaque latent spaces and relying on heavy decoders for reconstruction leaves these models computationally expensive and uninterpretable. We address this problem by introducing NOVA, a world modelling framework that represents the system state as the weights and biases of an auxiliary coordinate-based implicit neural representation (INR). This structured representation is analytically rendered, which eliminates the decoder bottleneck while conferring compactness, portability, and zero-shot super-resolution. Furthermore, like most latent action models, NOVA can be distilled into a context-dependent video generator via an action-matching objective. Surprisingly, without resorting to auxiliary losses or adversarial objectives, NOVA can disentangle structural scene components such as background, foreground, and inter-frame motion, enabling users to edit either content or dynamics without compromising the other. We validate our framework on several challenging datasets, achieving strong controllable forecasting while operating on a single consumer GPU at ∼\sim40M parameters. Ultimately, structured representations like INRs not only enhance our understanding of latent dynamics but also pave the way for immersive and customisable virtual experiences.

Roussel Desmond Nzoyem, Mauro Comi

Department of Computer Science University of Manchester Manchester, M13 9PL · Department of Computer Science University of Bristol Bristol, BS8 1QU

Disentangled Representation LearningImplicit Neural RepresentationsWorld ModelsControllable Video GenerationVideo World Models
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May 5, 2026

iWorld-Bench: A Benchmark for Interactive World Models with a Unified Action Generation Framework

Achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires agents that learn and interact adaptively, with interactive world models providing scalable environments for perception, reasoning, and action. Yet current research still lacks large-scale datasets and unified benchmarks to evaluate their physical interaction capabilities. To address this, we propose iWorld-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for training and testing world models on interaction-related abilities such as distance perception and memory. We construct a diverse dataset with 330k video clips and select 2.1k high-quality samples covering varied perspectives, weather, and scenes. As existing world models differ in interaction modalities, we introduce an Action Generation Framework to unify evaluation and design six task types, generating 4.9k test samples. These tasks jointly assess model performance across visual generation, trajectory following, and memory. Evaluating 14 representative world models, we identify key limitations and provide insights for future research. The iWorld-Bench model leaderboard is publicly available at iWorld-Bench.com.

Jianjie Fang, Yingshan Lei, Qin Wan +8

Tsinghua University, China · Northeastern University, China · South China University of Technology, China

World Model EvaluationInteractive World ModelsVideo World Models
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May 5, 2026

RoboAlign-R1: Distilled Multimodal Reward Alignment for Robot Video World Models

Existing robot video world models are typically trained with low-level objectives such as reconstruction and perceptual similarity, which are poorly aligned with the capabilities that matter most for robot decision making, including instruction following, manipulation success, and physical plausibility. They also suffer from error accumulation in long-horizon autoregressive prediction. We present RoboAlign-R1, a framework that combines reward-aligned post-training with stabilized long-horizon inference for robot video world models. We construct RobotWorldBench, a benchmark of 10,000 annotated video-instruction pairs collected from four robot data sources, and train a multimodal teacher judge, RoboAlign-Judge, to provide fine-grained six-dimensional evaluation of generated videos. We then distill the teacher into a lightweight student reward model for efficient reinforcement-learning-based post-training. To reduce long-horizon rollout drift, we further introduce Sliding Window Re-encoding (SWR), a training-free inference strategy that periodically refreshes the generation context. Under our in-domain evaluation protocol, RoboAlign-R1 improves the aggregate six-dimension score by 10.1% over the strongest baseline, including gains of 7.5% on Manipulation Accuracy and 4.6% on Instruction Following; these ranking improvements are further supported by an external VLM-based cross-check and a blinded human study. Meanwhile, SWR improves long-horizon prediction quality with only about 1% additional latency, yielding a 2.8% gain in SSIM and a 9.8% reduction in LPIPS. Together, these results show that reward-aligned post-training and stabilized long-horizon decoding improve task consistency, physical realism, and long-horizon prediction quality in robot video world models.

Hao Wu, Yuqi Li, Yuan Gao +10

Tencent · Tsinghua University · Department of Computer Science, City University of New York +3

Multimodal Reward ModelingWorld Model EvaluationTemporal Consistency in Video GenerationVideo World ModelsRobot Learning from Video
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Apr 30, 2026

World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.

Bohan Hou, Gen Li, Jindou Jia +15

Nanyang Technological University · University of California, Berkeley · Stanford University +6

World Model LearningWorld Models for RoboticsEmbodied World ModelsRobot LearningVideo World Models
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Apr 27, 2026

World-R1: Reinforcing 3D Constraints for Text-to-Video Generation

Recent video foundation models demonstrate impressive visual synthesis but frequently suffer from geometric inconsistencies. While existing methods attempt to inject 3D priors via architectural modifications, they often incur high computational costs and limit scalability. We propose World-R1, a framework that aligns video generation with 3D constraints through reinforcement learning. To facilitate this alignment, we introduce a specialized pure text dataset tailored for world simulation. Utilizing Flow-GRPO, we optimize the model using feedback from pre-trained 3D foundation models and vision-language models to enforce structural coherence without altering the underlying architecture. We further employ a periodic decoupled training strategy to balance rigid geometric consistency with dynamic scene fluidity. Extensive evaluations reveal that our approach significantly enhances 3D consistency while preserving the original visual quality of the foundation model, effectively bridging the gap between video generation and scalable world simulation.

Weijie Wang, Xiaoxuan He, Youping Gu +9

Zhejiang University · Microsoft Research · Independent Researcher

Physical Consistency in Video GenerationT2V GenerationGeometric Consistency in Video GenerationVideo World Models
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Apr 21, 2026

RoboWM-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating World Models in Robotic Manipulation

Recent advances in large-scale video world models have enabled increasingly realistic future prediction, raising the prospect of using generated videos as scalable supervision for robot learning. However, for embodied manipulation, perceptual realism alone is not sufficient: generated interactions must also be physically consistent and executable by robotic agents. Existing benchmarks provide valuable assessments of visual quality and physical plausibility, but they do not systematically evaluate whether predicted behaviors can be translated into executable actions that complete manipulation tasks. We introduce RoboWM-Bench, a manipulation-centric benchmark for embodiment-grounded evaluation of video world models. RoboWM-Bench converts generated human-hand and robotic manipulation videos into embodied action sequences and validates them through execution in physically grounded simulation environments. Built on real-to-sim scene reconstruction and diverse manipulation tasks, RoboWM-Bench enables standardized, reproducible, and scalable evaluation of physical executability. Using RoboWM-Bench, we evaluate state-of-the-art video world models and observe that visual plausibility and embodied executability are not always aligned. Our analysis highlights several recurring factors that affect execution performance, including spatial reasoning, contact prediction, and non-physical geometric distortions, particularly in complex and long-horizon interactions. These findings provide a more fine-grained view of current model capabilities and underscore the value of embodiment-aware evaluation for guiding physically grounded world modeling in robotic manipulation.

Feng Jiang, Yang Chen, Kyle Xu +8

Peking University · Tsinghua University · Lightwheel

Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation BenchmarksWorld Model EvaluationVideo World Models
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Apr 20, 2026

MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models

Video world models have achieved remarkable success in simulating environmental dynamics in response to actions by users or agents. They are modeled as action-conditioned video generation models that take historical frames and current actions as input to predict future frames. Yet, most existing approaches are limited to single-agent scenarios and fail to capture the complex interactions inherent in real-world multi-agent systems. We present MultiWorld, a unified framework for multi-agent multi-view world modeling that enables accurate control of multiple agents while maintaining multi-view consistency. We introduce the Multi-Agent Condition Module to achieve precise multi-agent controllability, and the Global State Encoder to ensure coherent observations across different views. MultiWorld supports flexible scaling of agent and view counts, and synthesizes different views in parallel for high efficiency. Experiments on multi-player game environments and multi-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that MultiWorld outperforms baselines in video fidelity, action-following ability, and multi-view consistency. Project page: https://multi-world.github.io/

Haoyu Wu, Jiwen Yu, Yingtian Zou +1

The University of Hong Kong · Sreal AI

Multi-View ConsistencyAction-Conditioned World ModelsMulti-Agent ControlControllable Video GenerationVideo World Models
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Apr 9, 2026

MotionScape: A Motion-Stratified UAV Video Benchmark for World Modeling and Future Video Generation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly crucial for low-altitude autonomy and complex environment understanding. World models enable UAVs to anticipate how future states may evolve under potential actions, providing predictive support for autonomous decision-making. For video world models, future video generation serves as a means of simulating future visual states, providing a direct basis for evaluating their predictive capability. However, existing UAV video resources typically focus on specific control signals or simulated environments. Standardized benchmarks for multi-condition UAV-view future video generation are still limited. To bridge this gap, we introduce MotionScape, a real-world UAV-view benchmark comprising 228 high-resolution video clips totaling 62,700 frames, with semantic annotations of weather and illumination conditions, scene environment, and camera-viewpoint motion. The clips are stratified into low-, medium-, and high-motion strata using optical-flow-based motion intensity. MotionScape supports Text2World, Image2World, and Video2World evaluation under a unified future-generation protocol. Technical validation with representative baseline models assesses performance across conditioning settings and motion strata, providing a unified platform for evaluating the future visual simulation capabilities of UAV world models.

Zile Guo, Zhan Chen, Xiaoxuan Liu +5

Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

Aerial RoboticsVideo GenerationWorld Model EvaluationVideo World Models
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Apr 8, 2026

INSPATIO-WORLD: A Real-Time 4D World Simulator via Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Modeling

Building world models with spatial consistency and real-time interactivity remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Current video generation paradigms often struggle with a lack of spatial persistence and insufficient visual realism, making it difficult to support seamless navigation in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose INSPATIO-WORLD, a novel real-time framework capable of recovering and generating high-fidelity, dynamic interactive scenes from a single reference video. At the core of our approach is a Spatiotemporal Autoregressive (STAR) architecture, which enables consistent and controllable scene evolution through two tightly coupled components: Implicit Spatiotemporal Cache aggregates reference and historical observations into a latent world representation, ensuring global consistency during long-horizon navigation; Explicit Spatial Constraint Module enforces geometric structure and translates user interactions into precise and physically plausible camera trajectories. Furthermore, we introduce Joint Distribution Matching Distillation (JDMD). By using real-world data distributions as a regularizing guide, JDMD effectively overcomes the fidelity degradation typically caused by over-reliance on synthetic data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INSPATIO-WORLD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in spatial consistency and interaction precision, ranking first among real-time interactive methods on the WorldScore-Dynamic benchmark, and establishing a practical pipeline for navigating 4D environments reconstructed from monocular videos.

InSpatio Team, Donghui Shen, Guofeng Zhang +20

Video World ModelsReal-Time Interactive Video GenerationCamera-Controlled Video GenerationDynamic Scene ReconstructionTemporal Consistency in Video GenerationAutoregressive Video Generation
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Apr 6, 2026

A Frame is Worth One Token: Efficient Generative World Modeling with Delta Tokens

Anticipating diverse future states is a central challenge in video world modeling. Discriminative world models produce a deterministic prediction that implicitly averages over possible futures, while existing generative world models remain computationally expensive. Recent work demonstrates that predicting the future in the feature space of a vision foundation model (VFM), rather than a latent space optimized for pixel reconstruction, requires significantly fewer world model parameters. However, most such approaches remain discriminative. In this work, we introduce DeltaTok, a tokenizer that encodes the VFM feature difference between consecutive frames into a single continuous "delta" token, and DeltaWorld, a generative world model operating on these tokens to efficiently generate diverse plausible futures. Delta tokens reduce video from a three-dimensional spatio-temporal representation to a one-dimensional temporal sequence, for example yielding a 1,024x token reduction with 512x512 frames. This compact representation enables tractable multi-hypothesis training, where many futures are generated in parallel and only the best is supervised. At inference, this leads to diverse predictions in a single forward pass. Experiments on dense forecasting tasks demonstrate that DeltaWorld forecasts futures that more closely align with real-world outcomes, while having over 35x fewer parameters and using 2,000x fewer FLOPs than existing generative world models. Code and weights: https://deltatok.github.io.

Tommie Kerssies, Gabriele Berton, Ju He +5

Amazon · Eindhoven University of Technology · Johns Hopkins University

Video World ModelsWorld Model LearningVideo PredictionVisual Tokenization
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Apr 2, 2026

ActionParty: Multi-Subject Action Binding in Generative Video Games

Recent advances in video diffusion have enabled the development of "world models" capable of simulating interactive environments. However, these models are largely restricted to single-agent settings, failing to control multiple agents simultaneously in a scene. In this work, we tackle a fundamental issue of action binding in existing video diffusion models, which struggle to associate specific actions with their corresponding subjects. For this purpose, we propose ActionParty, an action controllable multi-subject world model for generative video games. It introduces subject state tokens, i.e. latent variables that persistently capture the state of each subject in the scene. By jointly modeling state tokens and video latents with a spatial biasing mechanism, we disentangle global video frame rendering from individual action-controlled subject updates. We evaluate ActionParty on the Melting Pot benchmark, demonstrating the first video world model capable of controlling up to seven players simultaneously across 46 diverse environments. Our results show significant improvements in action-following accuracy and identity consistency, while enabling robust autoregressive tracking of subjects through complex interactions.

Alexander Pondaven, Ziyi Wu, Igor Gilitschenski +4

Snap Research · University of Oxford · University of Toronto +1

Video World ModelsVideo Diffusion Models
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Apr 2, 2026

DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning

Recently, world-action models (WAM) have emerged to bridge vision-language-action (VLA) models and world models, unifying their reasoning and instruction-following capabilities and spatio-temporal world modeling. However, existing WAM approaches often focus on modeling 2D appearance or latent representations, with limited geometric grounding-an essential element for embodied systems operating in the physical world. We present DriveDreamer-Policy, a unified driving world-action model that integrates depth generation, future video generation, and motion planning within a single modular architecture. The model employs a large language model to process language instructions, multi-view images, and actions, followed by three lightweight generators that produce depth, future video, and actions. By learning a geometry-aware world representation and using it to guide both future prediction and planning within a unified framework, the proposed model produces more coherent imagined futures and more informed driving actions, while maintaining modularity and controllable latency. Experiments on the Navsim v1 and v2 benchmarks demonstrate that DriveDreamer-Policy achieves strong performance on both closed-loop planning and world generation tasks. In particular, our model reaches 89.2 PDMS on Navsim v1 and 88.7 EPDMS on Navsim v2, outperforming existing world-model-based approaches while producing higher-quality future video and depth predictions. Ablation studies further show that explicit depth learning provides complementary benefits to video imagination and improves planning robustness.

Yang Zhou, Xiaofeng Wang, Hao Shao +8

GigaAI · University of Toronto · CUHK MMLab

World Action ModelsWorld Models for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving PlanningVideo World ModelsVision-Language-Action Models
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Mar 30, 2026

Video Generation Models as World Models: Efficient Paradigms, Architectures and Algorithms

The rapid evolution of video generation has enabled models to simulate complex physical dynamics and long-horizon causalities, positioning them as potential world simulators. However, a critical gap still remains between the theoretical capacity for world simulation and the heavy computational costs of spatiotemporal modeling. To address this, we comprehensively and systematically review video generation frameworks and techniques that consider efficiency as a crucial requirement for practical world modeling. We introduce a novel taxonomy in three dimensions: efficient modeling paradigms, efficient network architectures, and efficient inference algorithms. We further show that bridging this efficiency gap directly empowers interactive applications such as autonomous driving, embodied AI, and game simulation. Finally, we identify emerging research frontiers in efficient video-based world modeling, arguing that efficiency is a fundamental prerequisite for evolving video generators into general-purpose, real-time, and robust world simulators. A curated GitHub repository of the reviewed literature can be found at https://github.com/Isaachhh/Efficient-VWM-Survey.

Muyang He, Hanzhong Guo, Junxiong Lin +1

School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center, Hong Kong SAR, China

Video GenerationEfficient Video GenerationVideo World Models
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Mar 26, 2026

Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: Hybrid Memory for Dynamic Video World Models

Video world models have shown immense potential in simulating the physical world, yet existing memory mechanisms primarily treat environments as static canvases. When dynamic subjects hide out of sight and later re-emerge, current methods often struggle, leading to frozen, distorted, or vanishing subjects. To address this, we introduce Hybrid Memory, a novel paradigm requiring models to simultaneously act as precise archivists for static backgrounds and vigilant trackers for dynamic subjects, ensuring motion continuity during out-of-view intervals. To facilitate research in this direction, we construct HM-World, the first large-scale video dataset dedicated to hybrid memory. It features 59K high-fidelity clips with decoupled camera and subject trajectories, encompassing 17 diverse scenes, 49 distinct subjects, and meticulously designed exit-entry events to rigorously evaluate hybrid coherence. Furthermore, we propose HyDRA, a specialized memory architecture that compresses memory into tokens and utilizes a spatiotemporal relevance-driven retrieval mechanism. By selectively attending to relevant motion cues, HyDRA effectively preserves the identity and motion of hidden subjects. Extensive experiments on HM-World demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both dynamic subject consistency and overall generation quality. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/HyDRA.

Kaijin Chen, Dingkang Liang, Xin Zhou +4

Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology

Retrieval-Augmented Video GenerationMemory-Augmented Video GenerationVideo World ModelsTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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Mar 25, 2026

SEGAR: Selective Enhancement for Generative Augmented Reality

Generative world models offer a compelling foundation for augmented-reality (AR) applications: by predicting future image sequences that incorporate deliberate visual edits, they enable temporally coherent, augmented future frames that can be computed ahead of time and cached, avoiding per-frame rendering from scratch in real time. In this work, we present SEGAR, a preliminary framework that combines a diffusion-based world model with a selective correction stage to support this vision. The world model generates augmented future frames with region-specific edits while preserving others, and the correction stage subsequently aligns safety-critical regions with real-world observations while preserving intended augmentations elsewhere. We demonstrate this pipeline in driving scenarios as a representative setting where semantic region structure is well defined and real-world feedback is readily available. We view this as an early step toward generative world models as practical AR infrastructure, where future frames can be generated, cached, and selectively corrected on demand.

Fanjun Bu, Chenyang Yuan, Hiroshi Yasuda

Cornell University, Cornell Tech New York, NY, USA · Toyota Research Institute Cambridge, MA · Toyota Research Institute Los Altos, CA

Video World ModelsVideo Diffusion Models
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Mar 23, 2026

WorldCache: Content-Aware Caching for Accelerated Video World Models

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) power high-fidelity video world models but remain computationally expensive due to sequential denoising and costly spatio-temporal attention. Training-free feature caching accelerates inference by reusing intermediate activations across denoising steps; however, existing methods largely rely on a Zero-Order Hold assumption i.e., reusing cached features as static snapshots when global drift is small. This often leads to ghosting artifacts, blur, and motion inconsistencies in dynamic scenes. We propose WorldCache, a Perception-Constrained Dynamical Caching framework that improves both when and how to reuse features. WorldCache introduces motion-adaptive thresholds, saliency-weighted drift estimation, optimal approximation via blending and warping, and phase-aware threshold scheduling across diffusion steps. Our cohesive approach enables adaptive, motion-consistent feature reuse without retraining. On Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B evaluated on PAI-Bench, WorldCache achieves \textbf{2.3×\times} inference speedup while preserving 99.4% of baseline quality, substantially outperforming prior training-free caching approaches. Our code can be accessed on World-Cache.

Umair Nawaz, Ahmed Heakl, Ufaq Khan +3

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE · Linköping University, Sweden

Diffusion Model CachingDiffusion Model Inference AccelerationVideo Diffusion ModelsVideo World Models
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Mar 22, 2026

FluidWorld: Reaction-Diffusion Dynamics as a Predictive Substrate for World Models

World models learn to predict future states of an environment, enabling planning and mental simulation. Current approaches default to Transformer-based predictors operating in learned latent spaces. This comes at a cost: O(N^2) computation and no explicit spatial inductive bias. This paper asks a foundational question: is self-attention necessary for predictive world modeling, or can alternative computational substrates achieve comparable or superior results? I introduce FluidWorld, a proof-of-concept world model whose predictive dynamics are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) of reaction-diffusion type. Instead of using a separate neural network predictor, the PDE integration itself produces the future state prediction. In a strictly parameter-matched three-way ablation on unconditional UCF-101 video prediction (64x64, ~800K parameters, identical encoder, decoder, losses, and data), FluidWorld is compared against both a Transformer baseline (self-attention) and a ConvLSTM baseline (convolutional recurrence). While all three models converge to comparable single-step prediction loss, FluidWorld achieves 2x lower reconstruction error, produces representations with 10-15% higher spatial structure preservation and 18-25% more effective dimensionality, and critically maintains coherent multi-step rollouts where both baselines degrade rapidly. All experiments were conducted on a single consumer-grade PC (Intel Core i5, NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti), without any large-scale compute. These results establish that PDE-based dynamics, which natively provide O(N) spatial complexity, adaptive computation, and global spatial coherence through diffusion, are a viable and parameter-efficient alternative to both attention and convolutional recurrence for world modeling.

Fabien Polly

Independent Researcher

Reaction-Diffusion SystemsWorld Model LearningVideo World ModelsVideo PredictionDynamical Systems
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Mar 20, 2026

EgoForge: Goal-Directed Egocentric World Simulator

Generative world models have shown promise for simulating dynamic environments, yet egocentric video remains challenging due to rapid viewpoint changes, frequent hand-object interactions, and goal-directed procedures whose evolution depends on latent human intent. Existing approaches either focus on hand-centric instructional synthesis with limited scene evolution, perform static view translation without modeling action dynamics, or rely on dense supervision, such as camera trajectories, long video prefixes, and synchronized multi-camera capture. In this work, we introduce EgoForge, an egocentric goal-directed world simulator that generates coherent, first-person video rollouts from minimal static inputs: a single egocentric image, a high-level instruction, and an optional auxiliary exocentric view. To improve intent alignment and temporal coherence, we introduce GRAFT, a trajectory-level diffusion refinement method that uses positive and negative rollout distributions, derived from goal, temporal, scene-consistency, and perceptual rewards, to steer the diffusion velocity field toward coherent, goal-complete egocentric simulations. Extensive experiments show EgoForge achieves consistent gains in semantic alignment, geometric stability, and motion fidelity over strong baselines, and performs robustly in real-world smart-glasses experiments.

Yifan Shen, Jiateng Liu, Xinzhuo Li +9

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of California San Diego

HOI GenerationDiffusion Model GuidanceWorld ModelsControllable Video GenerationVideo World Models
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Mar 18, 2026

Stereo World Model: Camera-Guided Stereo Video Generation

We present StereoWorld, a camera-conditioned stereo world model that jointly learns appearance and binocular geometry for end-to-end stereo video generation.Unlike monocular RGB or RGBD approaches, StereoWorld operates exclusively within the RGB modality, while simultaneously grounding geometry directly from disparity. To efficiently achieve consistent stereo generation, our approach introduces two key designs: (1) a unified camera-frame RoPE that augments latent tokens with camera-aware rotary positional encoding, enabling relative, view- and time-consistent conditioning while preserving pretrained video priors via a stable attention initialization; and (2) a stereo-aware attention decomposition that factors full 4D attention into 3D intra-view attention plus horizontal row attention, leveraging the epipolar prior to capture disparity-aligned correspondences with substantially lower compute. Across benchmarks, StereoWorld improves stereo consistency, disparity accuracy, and camera-motion fidelity over strong monocular-then-convert pipelines, achieving more than 3x faster generation with an additional 5% gain in viewpoint consistency. Beyond benchmarks, StereoWorld enables end-to-end binocular VR rendering without depth estimation or inpainting, enhances embodied policy learning through metric-scale depth grounding, and is compatible with long-video distillation for extended interactive stereo synthesis.

Yang-Tian Sun, Zehuan Huang, Yifan Niu +4

The University of Hong Kong · VAST · ByteDance Pico

Video World ModelsCamera-Conditioned Video GenerationMulti-View Video GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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Mar 17, 2026

MosaicMem: Hybrid Spatial Memory for Controllable Video World Models

Video diffusion models are moving beyond short, plausible clips toward world simulators that must remain consistent under camera motion, revisits, and intervention. Yet spatial memory remains a key bottleneck: explicit 3D structures can improve reprojection-based consistency but struggle to depict moving objects, while implicit memory often produces inaccurate camera motion even with correct poses. We propose Mosaic Memory (MosaicMem), a hybrid spatial memory that lifts patches into 3D for reliable localization and targeted retrieval, while exploiting the model's native conditioning to preserve prompt-following generation. MosaicMem composes spatially aligned patches in the queried view via a patch-and-compose interface, preserving what should persist while allowing the model to inpaint what should evolve. With PRoPE camera conditioning and two new memory alignment methods, experiments show improved pose adherence compared to implicit memory and stronger dynamic modeling than explicit baselines. MosaicMem further enables minute-level navigation, memory-based scene editing, and autoregressive rollout.

Wei Yu, Runjia Qian, Yumeng Li +8

University of Toronto · Vector Institute · The University of Osaka +4

Memory-Augmented Video GenerationVideo World ModelsLong-Horizon Video GenerationCamera-Conditioned Video Generation
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Mar 17, 2026

WorldCam: Interactive Autoregressive 3D Gaming Worlds with Camera Pose as a Unifying Geometric Representation

Recent advances in video diffusion transformers have enabled interactive gaming world models that allow users to explore generated environments over extended horizons. However, existing approaches struggle with precise action control and long-horizon 3D consistency. Most prior works treat user actions as abstract conditioning signals, overlooking the fundamental geometric coupling between actions and the 3D world, whereby actions induce relative camera motions that accumulate into a global camera pose within a 3D world. In this paper, we establish camera pose as a unifying geometric representation to jointly ground immediate action control and long-term 3D consistency. First, we define a physics-based continuous action space and represent user inputs in the Lie algebra to derive precise 6-DoF camera poses, which are injected into the generative model via a camera embedder to ensure accurate action alignment. Second, we use global camera poses as spatial indices to retrieve relevant past observations, enabling geometrically consistent revisiting of locations during long-horizon navigation. To support this research, we introduce a large-scale dataset comprising 3,000 minutes of authentic human gameplay annotated with camera trajectories and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art interactive gaming world models in action controllability, long-horizon visual quality, and 3D spatial consistency.

Jisu Nam, Yicong Hong, Chun-Hao Paul Huang +9

KAIST · Adobe Research · MAUM AI

Interactive World ModelsAction-Conditioned World ModelsVideo World ModelsCamera-Controlled Video Generation
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Mar 17, 2026

World Reconstruction From Inconsistent Views

Video diffusion models generate high-quality and diverse worlds; however, individual frames often lack 3D consistency across the output sequence, which makes the reconstruction of 3D worlds difficult. To this end, we propose a new method that handles these inconsistencies by non-rigidly aligning the video frames into a globally-consistent coordinate frame that produces sharp and detailed pointcloud reconstructions. First, a geometric foundation model lifts each frame into a pixel-wise 3D pointcloud, which contains unaligned surfaces due to these inconsistencies. We then propose a tailored non-rigid iterative frame-to-model ICP to obtain an initial alignment across all frames, followed by a global optimization that further sharpens the pointcloud. Finally, we leverage this pointcloud as initialization for 3D reconstruction and propose a novel inverse deformation rendering loss to create high quality and explorable 3D environments from inconsistent views. We demonstrate that our 3D scenes achieve higher quality than baselines, effectively turning video models into 3D-consistent world generators.

Lukas Höllein, Matthias Nießner

Technical University of Munich, Germany

3D Reconstruction3D Scene GenerationMulti-View 3D ReconstructionPoint Cloud RegistrationVideo World Models
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Mar 16, 2026

Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis

What if a world simulation model could render not an imagined environment but a city that actually exists? Prior generative world models synthesize visually plausible yet artificial environments by imagining all content. We present Seoul World Model (SWM), a city-scale world model grounded in the real city of Seoul. SWM anchors autoregressive video generation through retrieval-augmented conditioning on nearby street-view images. However, this design introduces several challenges, including temporal misalignment between retrieved references and the dynamic target scene, limited trajectory diversity and data sparsity from vehicle-mounted captures at sparse intervals. We address these challenges through cross-temporal pairing, a large-scale synthetic dataset enabling diverse camera trajectories, and a view interpolation pipeline that synthesizes coherent training videos from sparse street-view images. We further introduce a Virtual Lookahead Sink to stabilize long-horizon generation by continuously re-grounding each chunk to a retrieved image at a future location. We evaluate SWM against recent video world models across three cities: Seoul, Busan, and Ann Arbor. SWM outperforms existing methods in generating spatially faithful, temporally consistent, long-horizon videos grounded in actual urban environments over trajectories reaching hundreds of meters, while supporting diverse camera movements and text-prompted scenario variations.

Junyoung Seo, Hyunwook Choi, Minkyung Kwon +10

KAIST AI · NAVER AI Lab · SNU AIIS

Retrieval-Augmented Video GenerationVideo World ModelsLong-Horizon Video GenerationCamera-Controlled Video GenerationTemporal Consistency in Video Generation3D Scene Generation
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Mar 13, 2026

Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Evaluating State Evolution in Video World Models

Evolutions in the world, such as water pouring or ice melting, happen regardless of being observed. Video world models generate "worlds" via 2D frame observations. Can these generated "worlds" evolve regardless of observation? To probe this question, we design a benchmark to evaluate whether video world models can decouple state evolution from observation. Our benchmark, STEVO-Bench, applies observation control to evolving processes via instructions of occluder insertion, turning off the light, or specifying camera "lookaway" trajectories. By evaluating video models with and without camera control for a diverse set of naturally-occurring evolutions, we expose their limitations in decoupling state evolution from observation. STEVO-Bench proposes an evaluation protocol to automatically detect and disentangle failure modes of video world models across key aspects of natural state evolution. Analysis of STEVO-Bench results provide new insight into potential data and architecture bias of present-day video world models. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/STEVOBench/. Blog: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/blog/2026/outofsight/

Ziqi Ma, Mengzhan Liufu, Georgia Gkioxari

California Institute of Technology

Video World ModelsWorld Model EvaluationPhysical Consistency in Video GenerationCamera-Controlled Video Generation
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Mar 13, 2026

SAW: Toward a Surgical Action World Model via Controllable and Scalable Video Generation

A surgical world model capable of generating realistic surgical action videos with precise control over tool-tissue interactions can address fundamental challenges in surgical AI and simulation -- from data scarcity and rare event synthesis to bridging the sim-to-real gap for surgical automation. However, current video generation methods, the very core of such surgical world models, require expensive annotations or complex structured intermediates as conditioning signals at inference, limiting their scalability. Other approaches exhibit limited temporal consistency across complex laparoscopic scenes and do not possess sufficient realism. We propose Surgical Action World (SAW) -- a step toward surgical action world modeling through video diffusion conditioned on four lightweight signals: language prompts encoding tool-action context, a reference surgical scene, tissue affordance mask, and 2D tool-tip trajectories. We design a conditional video diffusion approach that reformulates video-to-video diffusion into trajectory-conditioned surgical action synthesis. The backbone diffusion model is fine-tuned on a custom-curated dataset of 12,044 laparoscopic clips with lightweight spatiotemporal conditioning signals, leveraging a depth consistency loss to enforce geometric plausibility without requiring depth at inference. SAW achieves state-of-the-art temporal consistency (CD-FVD: 199.19 vs. 546.82) and strong visual quality on held-out test data. Furthermore, we demonstrate its downstream utility for (a) surgical AI, where augmenting rare actions with SAW-generated videos improves action recognition (clipping F1-score: 20.93% to 43.14%; cutting: 0.00% to 8.33%) on real test data, and (b) surgical simulation, where rendering tool-tissue interaction videos from simulator-derived trajectory points toward a visually faithful simulation engine.

Sampath Rapuri, Lalithkumar Seenivasan, Dominik Schneider +9

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA · NVIDIA

Trajectory-Guided Video GenerationAction-Conditioned Video GenerationVideo World ModelsControllable Video GenerationVideo Diffusion ModelsTemporal Consistency in Video Generation
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