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Jul 31

FrameDiffuser: G-Buffer-Conditioned Diffusion for Neural Forward Frame Rendering

Neural rendering for interactive applications requires translating geometric and material properties (G-buffer) to photorealistic images with realistic lighting on a frame-by-frame basis. While recent diffusion-based approaches show promise for G-buffer-conditioned image synthesis, they face critical limitations: single-image models like RGBX generate frames independently without temporal consistency, while video models like DiffusionRenderer are too computationally expensive for most consumer gaming sets ups and require complete sequences upfront, making them unsuitable for interactive applications where future frames depend on user input. We introduce FrameDiffuser, an autoregressive neural rendering framework that generates temporally consistent, photorealistic frames by conditioning on G-buffer data and the models own previous output. After an initial frame, FrameDiffuser operates purely on incoming G-buffer data, comprising geometry, materials, and surface properties, while using its previously generated frame for temporal guidance, maintaining stable, temporal consistent generation over hundreds to thousands of frames. Our dual-conditioning architecture combines ControlNet for structural guidance with ControlLoRA for temporal coherence. A three-stage training strategy enables stable autoregressive generation. We specialize our model to individual environments, prioritizing consistency and inference speed over broad generalization, demonstrating that environment-specific training achieves superior photorealistic quality with accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections compared to generalized approaches.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 18, 2025 2

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1

Antagonising explanation and revealing bias directly through sequencing and multimodal inference

Deep generative models produce data according to a learned representation, e.g. diffusion models, through a process of approximation computing possible samples. Approximation can be understood as reconstruction and the large datasets used to train models as sets of records in which we represent the physical world with some data structure (photographs, audio recordings, manuscripts). During the process of reconstruction, e.g., image frames develop each timestep towards a textual input description. While moving forward in time, frame sets are shaped according to learned bias and their production, we argue here, can be considered as going back in time; not by inspiration on the backward diffusion process but acknowledging culture is specifically marked in the records. Futures of generative modelling, namely in film and audiovisual arts, can benefit by dealing with diffusion systems as a process to compute the future by inevitably being tied to the past, if acknowledging the records as to capture fields of view at a specific time, and to correlate with our own finite memory ideals. Models generating new data distributions can target video production as signal processors and by developing sequences through timelines we ourselves also go back to decade-old algorithmic and multi-track methodologies revealing the actual predictive failure of contemporary approaches to synthesis in moving image, both as relevant to composition and not explanatory.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 25, 2023

A Large-Scale Outdoor Multi-modal Dataset and Benchmark for Novel View Synthesis and Implicit Scene Reconstruction

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved impressive results in single object scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, which have been demonstrated on many single modality and single object focused indoor scene datasets like DTU, BMVS, and NeRF Synthetic.However, the study of NeRF on large-scale outdoor scene reconstruction is still limited, as there is no unified outdoor scene dataset for large-scale NeRF evaluation due to expensive data acquisition and calibration costs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale outdoor multi-modal dataset, OMMO dataset, containing complex land objects and scenes with calibrated images, point clouds and prompt annotations. Meanwhile, a new benchmark for several outdoor NeRF-based tasks is established, such as novel view synthesis, surface reconstruction, and multi-modal NeRF. To create the dataset, we capture and collect a large number of real fly-view videos and select high-quality and high-resolution clips from them. Then we design a quality review module to refine images, remove low-quality frames and fail-to-calibrate scenes through a learning-based automatic evaluation plus manual review. Finally, a number of volunteers are employed to add the text descriptions for each scene and key-frame to meet the potential multi-modal requirements in the future. Compared with existing NeRF datasets, our dataset contains abundant real-world urban and natural scenes with various scales, camera trajectories, and lighting conditions. Experiments show that our dataset can benchmark most state-of-the-art NeRF methods on different tasks. We will release the dataset and model weights very soon.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 17, 2023

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.

amazon Amazon
·
Apr 5 2

World Action Models: A Survey

World Action Models (WAMs) are embodied predictive-action models that make a forecast of the future available to action. Recent WAMs repurpose large video generation models, and a parallel line relies on language or vision-language backbones without a video-generation core. This rapid expansion has blurred the boundary among broad world models, video generation models, action-grounded video world models, Vision-Language-Action policies, and WAMs. This survey gives the field a common account. It first clarifies these boundaries, then organizes existing works through two complementary views. The first view asks what each method is required to generate, spanning rendered futures, latent futures, and video-generation-free action reasoning. The second view decomposes each method by predictive substrate, backbone, action coupling, and deployment regime. This anatomy supports a unified discussion of interactability, causality, persistence, physical plausibility, and generalization, followed by data, evaluation, and open challenges. Across these axes, a consistent design pattern emerges: WAMs are not simply video generators with action heads, but predictive-action methods whose design choices trade representational richness against compute, memory, latency, and action-label cost. The field is moving toward methods that generate less of the future while preserving what control requires. The survey homepage is available at https://world-action-models.github.io/.

ProcVLM: Learning Procedure-Grounded Progress Rewards for Robotic Manipulation

Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires dense feedback that reflects how a task advances through its procedural stages, not merely whether the final outcome is successful. Existing reward models often rely on trajectory-level success labels or time-based interpolation, which can conflate elapsed time with true task progress and therefore fail to capture unfinished steps, stagnation, and failure states. We present ProcVLM, a progress-aware vision-language model that learns procedure-grounded progress as a dense reward signal for manipulation. Rather than deriving progress from terminal outcomes or temporal proxies, ProcVLM grounds progress estimation in procedural structure and intra-stage visual change, and further adopts a reasoning-before-estimation paradigm that infers the remaining atomic actions before estimating task progress. Specifically, we construct this supervision by synthesizing frame-level subtask-semantic annotations, assigning progress budgets according to subtask structure, and distributing each budget based on intra-subtask visual change. To train ProcVLM at scale, we build a standardized procedural supervision synthesis pipeline and construct ProcCorpus-60M from 30 embodied datasets with 60M annotated frames, from which we derive ProcVQA for procedure-aware pretraining, with progress estimation as the central task alongside action segmentation and future planning. Experiments on ProcVQA and reward-model benchmarks show that ProcVLM improves embodied procedural reasoning and yields more discriminative trajectory-internal progress estimates than representative baselines, supporting its use as a dense reward model for downstream reward-guided policy optimization. Project page: https://procvlm.github.io/

  • 10 authors
·
May 8

FutureDepth: Learning to Predict the Future Improves Video Depth Estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel video depth estimation approach, FutureDepth, which enables the model to implicitly leverage multi-frame and motion cues to improve depth estimation by making it learn to predict the future at training. More specifically, we propose a future prediction network, F-Net, which takes the features of multiple consecutive frames and is trained to predict multi-frame features one time step ahead iteratively. In this way, F-Net learns the underlying motion and correspondence information, and we incorporate its features into the depth decoding process. Additionally, to enrich the learning of multiframe correspondence cues, we further leverage a reconstruction network, R-Net, which is trained via adaptively masked auto-encoding of multiframe feature volumes. At inference time, both F-Net and R-Net are used to produce queries to work with the depth decoder, as well as a final refinement network. Through extensive experiments on several benchmarks, i.e., NYUDv2, KITTI, DDAD, and Sintel, which cover indoor, driving, and open-domain scenarios, we show that FutureDepth significantly improves upon baseline models, outperforms existing video depth estimation methods, and sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. Furthermore, FutureDepth is more efficient than existing SOTA video depth estimation models and has similar latencies when comparing to monocular models

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 19, 2024

AR-Diffusion: Asynchronous Video Generation with Auto-Regressive Diffusion

The task of video generation requires synthesizing visually realistic and temporally coherent video frames. Existing methods primarily use asynchronous auto-regressive models or synchronous diffusion models to address this challenge. However, asynchronous auto-regressive models often suffer from inconsistencies between training and inference, leading to issues such as error accumulation, while synchronous diffusion models are limited by their reliance on rigid sequence length. To address these issues, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion), a novel model that combines the strengths of auto-regressive and diffusion models for flexible, asynchronous video generation. Specifically, our approach leverages diffusion to gradually corrupt video frames in both training and inference, reducing the discrepancy between these phases. Inspired by auto-regressive generation, we incorporate a non-decreasing constraint on the corruption timesteps of individual frames, ensuring that earlier frames remain clearer than subsequent ones. This setup, together with temporal causal attention, enables flexible generation of videos with varying lengths while preserving temporal coherence. In addition, we design two specialized timestep schedulers: the FoPP scheduler for balanced timestep sampling during training, and the AD scheduler for flexible timestep differences during inference, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, which achieves competitive and state-of-the-art results across four challenging benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction

Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only for future frame prediction can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior work reading out depth or illumination from video generators required fine-tuning, which is impractical for flow where labels are scarce and synthetic datasets suffer from a sim-to-real gap. Inspired by the Counterfactual World Model (CWM) paradigm, which can obtain point-wise correspondences by injecting a small tracer perturbation into a next-frame predictor and tracking its propagation, we extend this idea to generative video models. We explore several popular architectures and find that successful zero-shot flow extraction in this manner is aided by three model properties: (1) distributional prediction of future frames (avoiding blurry or noisy outputs); (2) factorized latents that treat each spatio-temporal patch independently; and (3) random-access decoding that can condition on any subset of future pixels. These properties are uniquely present in the recent Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) architecture. Building on LRAS, we propose KL-tracing: a novel test-time procedure that injects a localized perturbation into the first frame, rolls out the model one step, and computes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between perturbed and unperturbed predictive distributions. Without any flow-specific fine-tuning, our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on real-world TAP-Vid DAVIS dataset (16.6% relative improvement for endpoint error) and synthetic TAP-Vid Kubric (4.7% relative improvement). Our results indicate that counterfactual prompting of controllable generative video models is a scalable and effective alternative to supervised or photometric-loss approaches for high-quality flow.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 11, 2025 1

VFMF: World Modeling by Forecasting Vision Foundation Model Features

Forecasting from partial observations is central to world modeling. Many recent methods represent the world through images, and reduce forecasting to stochastic video generation. Although such methods excel at realism and visual fidelity, predicting pixels is computationally intensive and not directly useful in many applications, as it requires translating RGB into signals useful for decision making. An alternative approach uses features from vision foundation models (VFMs) as world representations, performing deterministic regression to predict future world states. These features can be directly translated into actionable signals such as semantic segmentation and depth, while remaining computationally efficient. However, deterministic regression averages over multiple plausible futures, undermining forecast accuracy by failing to capture uncertainty. To address this crucial limitation, we introduce a generative forecaster that performs autoregressive flow matching in VFM feature space. Our key insight is that generative modeling in this space requires encoding VFM features into a compact latent space suitable for diffusion. We show that this latent space preserves information more effectively than previously used PCA-based alternatives, both for forecasting and other applications, such as image generation. Our latent predictions can be easily decoded into multiple useful and interpretable output modalities: semantic segmentation, depth, surface normals, and even RGB. With matched architecture and compute, our method produces sharper and more accurate predictions than regression across all modalities. Our results suggest that stochastic conditional generation of VFM features offers a promising and scalable foundation for future world models.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

Enfold: Folding World-Generator Computation into Predictive Representations for Efficient Embodied Control

World generative models are typically used through what they produce: a rendered future, a video-conditioned action, or latent context computed by a costly generative branch. We argue that their more reusable asset is the computation that constructs a future. As a generator transforms a corrupted future into a coherent trajectory, its intermediate states organize appearance, spatial layout, and interaction across levels of abstraction. Can this future-generative computation be internalized in a representation inferred from the present alone? We present Enfold, which transfers this computation into a representation predicted from the current visual context and language instruction. During training, multi-level states exposed as the generator processes the observed future supervise a current-only encoder. The learned representation is fed back to condition future generation and is read by task heads without allowing task gradients to reshape the encoder. At deployment, action prediction no longer executes the generator. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot tasks, Enfold supports strong control while reducing action latency by 3.7times relative to Fast--WAM, Enfold-Flash reaches 10.1times. Representation analyses show that it suppresses nuisance variation and preferentially captures changes that emerge over longer horizons. When the current scene is altered by human intervention, both the generated continuation and the executed actions adapt, which is inconsistent with fixed trajectory replay. These results recast a world generator as a source of predictive control representations: its future need not be materialized at every step if its internal structure can be enfolded into the present.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 28

DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024

Future Rendering neq Future Surface: A Benchmark and Dataset for Dynamic Surface Reconstruction Beyond the Observed Window

Dynamic-scene reconstruction is almost always evaluated inside the observed time window, yet deployment settings such as AR overlays, robot interaction, and anticipatory planning need the future surface: the geometry at times beyond those captured. No standard benchmark measures this. We introduce FutureSurf, a controlled diagnostic benchmark and dataset for future-time surface reconstruction that trades scene diversity for exact future ground truth and falsification controls. A method trains on the observed first 75% of a sequence; we score its extracted per-frame surface on the held-out future by Chamfer distance, reporting absolute future CD as the primary score and the future/observed gap as a diagnostic. The dataset contains eight analytically defined controlled motions, including three falsification controls, with exact per-frame ground-truth meshes. We also provide a ground-truth-side recoverability oracle. The release includes split files, scoring code, a benchmark card, and Croissant metadata. On the controlled motions, the DG-Mesh backbone leaves a 2.7-4.1times gap even for futures predictable in principle (four of five recoverable from observed motion by a fixed rule), while the falsification controls behave as designed (the surface-invariant motion shows no gap). Beyond the contributed dataset, the gap persists across six animated DG-Mesh asset scenes and a second backbone, Deformable-3DGS (2.0-6.6times; both share a deformation-MLP temporal model). The benchmark also shows that future rendering quality and future-surface accuracy are statistically decoupled, so the novel-view-synthesis metrics the field reports do not track future geometry. The future error is structured, concentrating where the surface moves. The dataset, evaluation toolkit, and scoring code are available on Hugging Face and GitHub (https://github.com/Ricky-S/futuresurf).

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 22

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^1, next^2, next^3 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.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8 2

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

ETHZurich ETH Zürich
·
Jun 14 3

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/

antgroup Ant Group
·
May 11 1

ViD-GPT: Introducing GPT-style Autoregressive Generation in Video Diffusion Models

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. But generating temporal consistent long videos is still challenging. A majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate long videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on last frames of previous clip. However, existing approaches all involve bidirectional computations, which restricts the receptive context of each autoregression step, and results in the model lacking long-term dependencies. Inspired from the huge success of large language models (LLMs) and following GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), we bring causal (i.e., unidirectional) generation into VDMs, and use past frames as prompt to generate future frames. For Causal Generation, we introduce causal temporal attention into VDM, which forces each generated frame to depend on its previous frames. For Frame as Prompt, we inject the conditional frames by concatenating them with noisy frames (frames to be generated) along the temporal axis. Consequently, we present Video Diffusion GPT (ViD-GPT). Based on the two key designs, in each autoregression step, it is able to acquire long-term context from prompting frames concatenated by all previously generated frames. Additionally, we bring the kv-cache mechanism to VDMs, which eliminates the redundant computation from overlapped frames, significantly boosting the inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ViD-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on long video generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/Causal-VideoGen.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds

Humans possess the remarkable ability to foresee the future to a certain extent based on present observations, a skill we term as foresight minds. However, this capability remains largely under explored within existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), hindering their capacity to learn the fundamental principles of how things operate and the intentions behind the observed subjects. To address this issue, we introduce the integration of future modeling into the existing learning frameworks of MLLMs. By utilizing the subject trajectory, a highly structured representation of a consecutive frame sequence, as a learning objective, we aim to bridge the gap between the past and the future. We propose two innovative methods to empower MLLMs with foresight minds, Foresight Pre-Training (FPT) and Foresight Instruction-Tuning (FIT), which are inspired by the modern learning paradigm of LLMs. Specifically, FPT jointly training various tasks centered on trajectories, enabling MLLMs to learn how to attend and predict entire trajectories from a given initial observation. Then, FIT requires MLLMs to first predict trajectories of related objects and then reason about potential future events based on them. Aided by FPT and FIT, we build a novel and unified MLLM named Merlin that supports multi-images input and analysis about potential actions of multiple objects for the future reasoning. Experimental results show Merlin powerful foresight minds with impressive performance on both future reasoning and visual comprehension tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023 1

PRISM: Streaming Human Motion Generation with Per-Joint Latent Decomposition

Text-to-motion generation has advanced rapidly, yet two challenges persist. First, existing motion autoencoders compress each frame into a single monolithic latent vector, entangling trajectory and per-joint rotations in an unstructured representation that downstream generators struggle to model faithfully. Second, text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, and long-horizon sequential synthesis typically require separate models or task-specific mechanisms, with autoregressive approaches suffering from severe error accumulation over extended rollouts. We present PRISM, addressing each challenge with a dedicated contribution. (1) A joint-factorized motion latent space: each body joint occupies its own token, forming a structured 2D grid (time joints) compressed by a causal VAE with forward-kinematics supervision. This simple change to the latent space -- without modifying the generator -- substantially improves generation quality, revealing that latent space design has been an underestimated bottleneck. (2) Noise-free condition injection: each latent token carries its own timestep embedding, allowing conditioning frames to be injected as clean tokens (timestep0) while the remaining tokens are denoised. This unifies text-to-motion and pose-conditioned generation in a single model, and directly enables autoregressive segment chaining for streaming synthesis. Self-forcing training further suppresses drift in long rollouts. With these two components, we train a single motion generation foundation model that seamlessly handles text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, autoregressive sequential generation, and narrative motion composition, achieving state-of-the-art on HumanML3D, MotionHub, BABEL, and a 50-scenario user study.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 9

Astra: General Interactive World Model with Autoregressive Denoising

Recent advances in diffusion transformers have empowered video generation models to generate high-quality video clips from texts or images. However, world models with the ability to predict long-horizon futures from past observations and actions remain underexplored, especially for general-purpose scenarios and various forms of actions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Astra, an interactive general world model that generates real-world futures for diverse scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving, robot grasping) with precise action interactions (e.g., camera motion, robot action). We propose an autoregressive denoising architecture and use temporal causal attention to aggregate past observations and support streaming outputs. We use a noise-augmented history memory to avoid over-reliance on past frames to balance responsiveness with temporal coherence. For precise action control, we introduce an action-aware adapter that directly injects action signals into the denoising process. We further develop a mixture of action experts that dynamically route heterogeneous action modalities, enhancing versatility across diverse real-world tasks such as exploration, manipulation, and camera control. Astra achieves interactive, consistent, and general long-term video prediction and supports various forms of interactions. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the improvements of Astra in fidelity, long-range prediction, and action alignment over existing state-of-the-art world models.

THU1911 Tsinghua University
·
Dec 9, 2025

GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.

open-gigaai GigaAI
·
Mar 17 2

Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds

Recent advances in video generation enable a new paradigm for 3D scene creation: generating camera-controlled videos that simulate scene walkthroughs, then lifting them to 3D via feed-forward reconstruction techniques. This generative reconstruction approach combines the visual fidelity and creative capacity of video models with 3D outputs ready for real-time rendering and simulation. Scaling to large, complex environments requires 3D-consistent video generation over long camera trajectories with large viewpoint changes and location revisits, a setting where current video models degrade quickly. Existing methods for long-horizon generation are fundamentally limited by two forms of degradation: spatial forgetting and temporal drifting. As exploration proceeds, previously observed regions fall outside the model's temporal context, forcing the model to hallucinate structures when revisited. Meanwhile, autoregressive generation accumulates small synthesis errors over time, gradually distorting scene appearance and geometry. We present Lyra 2.0, a framework for generating persistent, explorable 3D worlds at scale. To address spatial forgetting, we maintain per-frame 3D geometry and use it solely for information routing -- retrieving relevant past frames and establishing dense correspondences with the target viewpoints -- while relying on the generative prior for appearance synthesis. To address temporal drifting, we train with self-augmented histories that expose the model to its own degraded outputs, teaching it to correct drift rather than propagate it. Together, these enable substantially longer and 3D-consistent video trajectories, which we leverage to fine-tune feed-forward reconstruction models that reliably recover high-quality 3D scenes.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Apr 13 4

Pixel-to-4D: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Generation with Dynamic 3D Gaussians

Humans excel at forecasting the future dynamics of a scene given just a single image. Video generation models that can mimic this ability are an essential component for intelligent systems. Recent approaches have improved temporal coherence and 3D consistency in single-image-conditioned video generation. However, these methods often lack robust user controllability, such as modifying the camera path, limiting their applicability in real-world applications. Most existing camera-controlled image-to-video models struggle with accurately modeling camera motion, maintaining temporal consistency, and preserving geometric integrity. Leveraging explicit intermediate 3D representations offers a promising solution by enabling coherent video generation aligned with a given camera trajectory. Although these methods often use 3D point clouds to render scenes and introduce object motion in a later stage, this two-step process still falls short in achieving full temporal consistency, despite allowing precise control over camera movement. We propose a novel framework that constructs a 3D Gaussian scene representation and samples plausible object motion, given a single image in a single forward pass. This enables fast, camera-guided video generation without the need for iterative denoising to inject object motion into render frames. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo, RealEstate10K and DL3DV-10K datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art video quality and inference efficiency. The project page is available at https://melonienimasha.github.io/Pixel-to-4D-Website.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 2

MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation

World-model-based imagine-then-act becomes a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, yet existing approaches typically support either purely image-based forecasting or reasoning over partial 3D geometry, limiting their ability to predict complete 4D scene dynamics. This work proposes a novel embodied 4D world model that enables geometrically consistent, arbitrary-view RGBD generation: given only a single-view RGBD observation as input, the model imagines the remaining viewpoints, which can then be back-projected and fused to assemble a more complete 3D structure across time. To efficiently learn the multi-view, cross-modality generation, we explicitly design cross-view and cross-modality feature fusion that jointly encourage consistency between RGB and depth and enforce geometric alignment across views. Beyond prediction, converting generated futures into actions is often handled by inverse dynamics, which is ill-posed because multiple actions can explain the same transition. We address this with a test-time action optimization strategy that backpropagates through the generative model to infer a trajectory-level latent best matching the predicted future, and a residual inverse dynamics model that turns this trajectory prior into accurate executable actions. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate strong performance on both 4D scene generation and downstream manipulation, and ablations provide practical insights into the key design choices.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 10

MIND-V: Hierarchical Video Generation for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment

Embodied imitation learning is constrained by the scarcity of diverse, long-horizon robotic manipulation data. Existing video generation models for this domain are limited to synthesizing short clips of simple actions and often rely on manually defined trajectories. To this end, we introduce MIND-V, a hierarchical framework designed to synthesize physically plausible and logically coherent videos of long-horizon robotic manipulation. Inspired by cognitive science, MIND-V bridges high-level reasoning with pixel-level synthesis through three core components: a Semantic Reasoning Hub (SRH) that leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for task planning; a Behavioral Semantic Bridge (BSB) that translates abstract instructions into domain-invariant representations; and a Motor Video Generator (MVG) for conditional video rendering. MIND-V employs Staged Visual Future Rollouts, a test-time optimization strategy to enhance long-horizon robustness. To align the generated videos with physical laws, we introduce a GRPO reinforcement learning post-training phase guided by a novel Physical Foresight Coherence (PFC) reward. PFC leverages the V-JEPA world model to enforce physical plausibility by aligning the predicted and actual dynamic evolutions in the feature space. MIND-V demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in long-horizon robotic manipulation video generation, establishing a scalable and controllable paradigm for embodied data synthesis.

Tsinghua Tsinghua University
·
Dec 6, 2025 2

Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time

Accurately anticipating how complex, diverse scenes will evolve requires models that represent uncertainty, simulate along extended interaction chains, and efficiently explore many plausible futures. Yet most existing approaches rely on dense video or latent-space prediction, expending substantial capacity on dense appearance rather than on the underlying sparse trajectories of points in the scene. This makes large-scale exploration of future hypotheses costly and limits performance when long-horizon, multi-modal motion is essential. We address this by formulating the prediction of open-set future scene dynamics as step-wise inference over sparse point trajectories. Our autoregressive diffusion model advances these trajectories through short, locally predictable transitions, explicitly modeling the growth of uncertainty over time. This dynamics-centric representation enables fast rollout of thousands of diverse futures from a single image, optionally guided by initial constraints on motion, while maintaining physical plausibility and long-range coherence. We further introduce OWM, a benchmark for open-set motion prediction based on diverse in-the-wild videos, to evaluate accuracy and variability of predicted trajectory distributions under real-world uncertainty. Our method matches or surpasses dense simulators in predictive accuracy while achieving orders-of-magnitude higher sampling speed, making open-set future prediction both scalable and practical. Project page: http://compvis.github.io/myriad.

CompVis CompVis
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Apr 9 2

Closing the Loop: Training-Free Revisit Consistency for Autoregressive Generative Rendering

Recent conditional video generation models have shown promising potentials to transform 3D engine renderings, such as depth maps and untextured geometry, into photorealistic videos for gaming and immersive content creation. These applications require long-horizon auto-regressive generation that continuously synthesizes new frames while preserving a persistent 3D world. Auto-regressive generators synthesize video chunk by chunk with a bounded KV cache, so when the camera revisits a location after its context has been evicted, the model often regenerates inconsistent appearance, even though the conditioning renderings (e.g., depth) remain perfectly aligned with the underlying geometry.We address this revisit inconsistency without any post-training by exploiting correspondences the 3D engine already provides: temporal correspondence retrieves pose-matched historical latent chunks into the KV cache as loop-closure memory, while spatial correspondence from camera pose and depth reprojection biases token-level attention toward geometrically corresponding regions of the retrieved chunks. We demonstrate our method on loop-closure trajectories mined from TartanAir and TartanGround dataset to mirror complicate real-world application scenarios, where it outperforms existing training-free baselines on revisit consistency without losing overall video quality. Project Page: https://wenchao-m.github.io/ClosetheLoop.github.io/

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 22

ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation

Recent advances in large generative models have significantly advanced image editing and in-context image generation, yet a critical gap remains in ensuring physical consistency, where edited objects must remain coherent. This capability is especially vital for world simulation related tasks. In this paper, we present ChronoEdit, a framework that reframes image editing as a video generation problem. First, ChronoEdit treats the input and edited images as the first and last frames of a video, allowing it to leverage large pretrained video generative models that capture not only object appearance but also the implicit physics of motion and interaction through learned temporal consistency. Second, ChronoEdit introduces a temporal reasoning stage that explicitly performs editing at inference time. Under this setting, the target frame is jointly denoised with reasoning tokens to imagine a plausible editing trajectory that constrains the solution space to physically viable transformations. The reasoning tokens are then dropped after a few steps to avoid the high computational cost of rendering a full video. To validate ChronoEdit, we introduce PBench-Edit, a new benchmark of image-prompt pairs for contexts that require physical consistency, and demonstrate that ChronoEdit surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in both visual fidelity and physical plausibility. Code and models for both the 14B and 2B variants of ChronoEdit will be released on the project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/chronoedit

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 5, 2025 2

WorldReasonBench: Human-Aligned Stress Testing of Video Generators as Future World-State Predictors

Commercial video generation systems such as Seedance2.0 and Veo3.1 have rapidly improved, strengthening the view that video generators may be evolving into "world simulators." Yet the community still lacks a benchmark that directly tests whether a model can reason about how an observed world should evolve over time. We introduce WorldReasonBench, which reframes video generation evaluation as world-state prediction: given an initial state and an action, can a model generate a future video whose state evolution remains physically, socially, logically, and informationally consistent? WorldReasonBench contains 436 curated test cases with structured ground-truth QA annotations spanning four reasoning dimensions and 22 subcategories. We evaluate generated videos with a human-aligned two-part methodology: Process-aware Reasoning Verification uses structured QA and reasoning-phase diagnostics to detect temporal and causal failures, while Multi-dimensional Quality Assessment scores reasoning quality, temporal consistency, and visual aesthetics for ranking and reward modeling. We further introduce WorldRewardBench, a preference benchmark with approximately 6K expert-annotated pairs over 1.4K videos, supporting pair-wise and point-wise reward-model evaluation. Across modern video generators, our results expose a persistent gap between visual plausibility and world reasoning: videos can look convincing while failing dynamics, causality, or information preservation. We will release our benchmarks and evaluation toolkit to support community research on genuinely world-aware video generation at https://github.com/UniX-AI-Lab/WorldReasonBench/.

UniX-Lab UniX Lab
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May 10 1

Persistent Robot World Models: Stabilizing Multi-Step Rollouts via Reinforcement Learning

Action-conditioned robot world models generate future video frames of the manipulated scene given a robot action sequence, offering a promising alternative for simulating tasks that are difficult to model with traditional physics engines. However, these models are optimized for short-term prediction and break down when deployed autoregressively: each predicted clip feeds back as context for the next, causing errors to compound and visual quality to rapidly degrade. We address this through the following contributions. First, we introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) post-training scheme that trains the world model on its own autoregressive rollouts rather than on ground-truth histories. We achieve this by adapting a recent contrastive RL objective for diffusion models to our setting and show that its convergence guarantees carry over exactly. Second, we design a training protocol that generates and compares multiple candidate variable-length futures from the same rollout state, reinforcing higher-fidelity predictions over lower-fidelity ones. Third, we develop efficient, multi-view visual fidelity rewards that combine complementary perceptual metrics across camera views and are aggregated at the clip level for dense, low-variance training signal. Fourth, we show that our approach establishes a new state-of-the-art for rollout fidelity on the DROID dataset, outperforming the strongest baseline on all metrics (e.g., LPIPS reduced by 14% on external cameras, SSIM improved by 9.1% on the wrist camera), winning 98% of paired comparisons, and achieving an 80% preference rate in a blind human study.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 26

DyST-XL: Dynamic Layout Planning and Content Control for Compositional Text-to-Video Generation

Compositional text-to-video generation, which requires synthesizing dynamic scenes with multiple interacting entities and precise spatial-temporal relationships, remains a critical challenge for diffusion-based models. Existing methods struggle with layout discontinuity, entity identity drift, and implausible interaction dynamics due to unconstrained cross-attention mechanisms and inadequate physics-aware reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose DyST-XL, a training-free framework that enhances off-the-shelf text-to-video models (e.g., CogVideoX-5B) through frame-aware control. DyST-XL integrates three key innovations: (1) A Dynamic Layout Planner that leverages large language models (LLMs) to parse input prompts into entity-attribute graphs and generates physics-aware keyframe layouts, with intermediate frames interpolated via trajectory optimization; (2) A Dual-Prompt Controlled Attention Mechanism that enforces localized text-video alignment through frame-aware attention masking, achieving precise control over individual entities; and (3) An Entity-Consistency Constraint strategy that propagates first-frame feature embeddings to subsequent frames during denoising, preserving object identity without manual annotation. Experiments demonstrate that DyST-XL excels in compositional text-to-video generation, significantly improving performance on complex prompts and bridging a crucial gap in training-free video synthesis. The code is released in https://github.com/XiaoBuL/DyST-XL.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 21, 2025

Playing with Transformer at 30+ FPS via Next-Frame Diffusion

Autoregressive video models offer distinct advantages over bidirectional diffusion models in creating interactive video content and supporting streaming applications with arbitrary duration. In this work, we present Next-Frame Diffusion (NFD), an autoregressive diffusion transformer that incorporates block-wise causal attention, enabling iterative sampling and efficient inference via parallel token generation within each frame. Nonetheless, achieving real-time video generation remains a significant challenge for such models, primarily due to the high computational cost associated with diffusion sampling and the hardware inefficiencies inherent to autoregressive generation. To address this, we introduce two innovations: (1) We extend consistency distillation to the video domain and adapt it specifically for video models, enabling efficient inference with few sampling steps; (2) To fully leverage parallel computation, motivated by the observation that adjacent frames often share the identical action input, we propose speculative sampling. In this approach, the model generates next few frames using current action input, and discard speculatively generated frames if the input action differs. Experiments on a large-scale action-conditioned video generation benchmark demonstrate that NFD beats autoregressive baselines in terms of both visual quality and sampling efficiency. We, for the first time, achieves autoregressive video generation at over 30 Frames Per Second (FPS) on an A100 GPU using a 310M model.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

TeleWorld: Towards Dynamic Multimodal Synthesis with a 4D World Model

World models aim to endow AI systems with the ability to represent, generate, and interact with dynamic environments in a coherent and temporally consistent manner. While recent video generation models have demonstrated impressive visual quality, they remain limited in real-time interaction, long-horizon consistency, and persistent memory of dynamic scenes, hindering their evolution into practical world models. In this report, we present TeleWorld, a real-time multimodal 4D world modeling framework that unifies video generation, dynamic scene reconstruction, and long-term world memory within a closed-loop system. TeleWorld introduces a novel generation-reconstruction-guidance paradigm, where generated video streams are continuously reconstructed into a dynamic 4D spatio-temporal representation, which in turn guides subsequent generation to maintain spatial, temporal, and physical consistency. To support long-horizon generation with low latency, we employ an autoregressive diffusion-based video model enhanced with Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL)--a hierarchical planning method that reduces error accumulation from frame-level to segment-level-alongside efficient Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), enabling real-time synthesis under practical computational budgets. Our approach achieves seamless integration of dynamic object modeling and static scene representation within a unified 4D framework, advancing world models toward practical, interactive, and computationally accessible systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeleWorld achieves strong performance in both static and dynamic world understanding, long-term consistency, and real-time generation efficiency, positioning it as a practical step toward interactive, memory-enabled world models for multimodal generation and embodied intelligence.

  • 27 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025

PAN: A World Model for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation

A world model enables an intelligent agent to imagine, predict, and reason about how the world evolves in response to its actions, and accordingly to plan and strategize. While recent video generation models produce realistic visual sequences, they typically operate in the prompt-to-full-video manner without causal control, interactivity, or long-horizon consistency required for purposeful reasoning. Existing world modeling efforts, on the other hand, often focus on restricted domains (e.g., physical, game, or 3D-scene dynamics) with limited depth and controllability, and struggle to generalize across diverse environments and interaction formats. In this work, we introduce PAN, a general, interactable, and long-horizon world model that predicts future world states through high-quality video simulation conditioned on history and natural language actions. PAN employs the Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture that combines an autoregressive latent dynamics backbone based on a large language model (LLM), which grounds simulation in extensive text-based knowledge and enables conditioning on language-specified actions, with a video diffusion decoder that reconstructs perceptually detailed and temporally coherent visual observations, to achieve a unification between latent space reasoning (imagination) and realizable world dynamics (reality). Trained on large-scale video-action pairs spanning diverse domains, PAN supports open-domain, action-conditioned simulation with coherent, long-term dynamics. Extensive experiments show that PAN achieves strong performance in action-conditioned world simulation, long-horizon forecasting, and simulative reasoning compared to other video generators and world models, taking a step towards general world models that enable predictive simulation of future world states for reasoning and acting.

  • 34 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025 4

ConFu: Contemplate the Future for Better Speculative Sampling

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The effectiveness of this paradigm critically depends on the quality of the draft model. While recent advances such as the EAGLE series achieve state-of-the-art speedup, existing draft models remain limited by error accumulation: they condition only on the current prefix, causing their predictions to drift from the target model over steps. In this work, we propose ConFu (Contemplate the Future), a novel speculative decoding framework that enables draft models to anticipate the future direction of generation. ConFu introduces (i) contemplate tokens and soft prompts that allow the draft model to leverage future-oriented signals from the target model at negligible cost, (ii) a dynamic contemplate token mechanism with MoE to enable context-aware future prediction, and (iii) a training framework with anchor token sampling and future prediction replication that learns robust future prediction. Experiments demonstrate that ConFu improves token acceptance rates and generation speed over EAGLE-3 by 8--11% across various downstream tasks with Llama-3 3B and 8B models. We believe our work is the first to bridge speculative decoding with continuous reasoning tokens, offering a new direction for accelerating LLM inference.

qualcomm Qualcomm
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Mar 9 2

AntGPT: Can Large Language Models Help Long-term Action Anticipation from Videos?

Can we better anticipate an actor's future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after his/her current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if we also know the longer-term goal of the actor (e.g. making egg fried rice)? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor's future behavior from video observations in the form of verb and noun sequences, and it is crucial for human-machine interaction. We propose to formulate the LTA task from two perspectives: a bottom-up approach that predicts the next actions autoregressively by modeling temporal dynamics; and a top-down approach that infers the goal of the actor and plans the needed procedure to accomplish the goal. We hypothesize that large language models (LLMs), which have been pretrained on procedure text data (e.g. recipes, how-tos), have the potential to help LTA from both perspectives. It can help provide the prior knowledge on the possible next actions, and infer the goal given the observed part of a procedure, respectively. To leverage the LLMs, we propose a two-stage framework, AntGPT. It first recognizes the actions already performed in the observed videos and then asks an LLM to predict the future actions via conditioned generation, or to infer the goal and plan the whole procedure by chain-of-thought prompting. Empirical results on the Ego4D LTA v1 and v2 benchmarks, EPIC-Kitchens-55, as well as EGTEA GAZE+ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. AntGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on all above benchmarks, and can successfully infer the goal and thus perform goal-conditioned "counterfactual" prediction via qualitative analysis. Code and model will be released at https://brown-palm.github.io/AntGPT

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 30, 2023

InternVLA-A1.5: Unifying Understanding, Latent Foresight, and Action for Compositional Generalization

Unified models for robot manipulation aim to equip one policy with both the semantic priors of pretrained VLMs and the physical dynamics learned through future prediction. In practice, existing designs tend to erode the semantics of the pretrained backbone, suffer interference among heterogeneous objectives, and learn future prediction from scratch in pixel space, leaving the dynamics priors of pretrained video generators unexploited. We present InternVLA-A1.5, which builds the policy on a native VLM backbone that keeps training on VQA and subtask prediction, and attaches a lightweight unified expert for continuous action generation. Future prediction is recast as a latent-querying problem, where a small set of learnable foresight tokens condenses the task-relevant future into a compact latent code under the supervision of a frozen pretrained video generation model, so the policy inherits world-model dynamics priors without ever learning pixel-level generation. The video branch is discarded at inference, keeping real-time control. Pretrained on 1.2M robot episodes and 3M multimodal samples, InternVLA-A1.5 achieves the best overall results on all six simulation benchmarks. In the real world, the preserved semantics deliver the strongest compositional generalization on held-out instruction bindings, and the two designs together sustain long-horizon execution.

Progressive Human Motion Generation Based on Text and Few Motion Frames

Although existing text-to-motion (T2M) methods can produce realistic human motion from text description, it is still difficult to align the generated motion with the desired postures since using text alone is insufficient for precisely describing diverse postures. To achieve more controllable generation, an intuitive way is to allow the user to input a few motion frames describing precise desired postures. Thus, we explore a new Text-Frame-to-Motion (TF2M) generation task that aims to generate motions from text and very few given frames. Intuitively, the closer a frame is to a given frame, the lower the uncertainty of this frame is when conditioned on this given frame. Hence, we propose a novel Progressive Motion Generation (PMG) method to progressively generate a motion from the frames with low uncertainty to those with high uncertainty in multiple stages. During each stage, new frames are generated by a Text-Frame Guided Generator conditioned on frame-aware semantics of the text, given frames, and frames generated in previous stages. Additionally, to alleviate the train-test gap caused by multi-stage accumulation of incorrectly generated frames during testing, we propose a Pseudo-frame Replacement Strategy for training. Experimental results show that our PMG outperforms existing T2M generation methods by a large margin with even one given frame, validating the effectiveness of our PMG. Code is available at https://github.com/qinghuannn/PMG.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

Time-R1: Towards Comprehensive Temporal Reasoning in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities but lack robust temporal intelligence, struggling to integrate reasoning about the past with predictions and plausible generations of the future. Meanwhile, existing methods typically target isolated temporal skills, such as question answering about past events or basic forecasting, and exhibit poor generalization, particularly when dealing with events beyond their knowledge cutoff or requiring creative foresight. To address these limitations, we introduce Time-R1, the first framework to endow a moderate-sized (3B-parameter) LLM with comprehensive temporal abilities: understanding, prediction, and creative generation. Our approach features a novel three-stage development path; the first two constitute a reinforcement learning (RL) curriculum driven by a meticulously designed dynamic rule-based reward system. This framework progressively builds (1) foundational temporal understanding and logical event-time mappings from historical data, (2) future event prediction skills for events beyond its knowledge cutoff, and finally (3) enables remarkable generalization to creative future scenario generation without any fine-tuning. Strikingly, experiments demonstrate that Time-R1 outperforms models over 200 times larger, including the state-of-the-art 671B DeepSeek-R1, on highly challenging future event prediction and creative scenario generation benchmarks. This work provides strong evidence that thoughtfully engineered, progressive RL fine-tuning allows smaller, efficient models to achieve superior temporal performance, offering a practical and scalable path towards truly time-aware AI. To foster further research, we also release Time-Bench, a large-scale multi-task temporal reasoning dataset derived from 10 years of news data, and our series of Time-R1 checkpoints.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16, 2025 3

Long-Context Autoregressive Video Modeling with Next-Frame Prediction

Long-context autoregressive modeling has significantly advanced language generation, but video generation still struggles to fully utilize extended temporal contexts. To investigate long-context video modeling, we introduce Frame AutoRegressive (FAR), a strong baseline for video autoregressive modeling. Just as language models learn causal dependencies between tokens (i.e., Token AR), FAR models temporal causal dependencies between continuous frames, achieving better convergence than Token AR and video diffusion transformers. Building on FAR, we observe that long-context vision modeling faces challenges due to visual redundancy. Existing RoPE lacks effective temporal decay for remote context and fails to extrapolate well to long video sequences. Additionally, training on long videos is computationally expensive, as vision tokens grow much faster than language tokens. To tackle these issues, we propose balancing locality and long-range dependency. We introduce FlexRoPE, an test-time technique that adds flexible temporal decay to RoPE, enabling extrapolation to 16x longer vision contexts. Furthermore, we propose long short-term context modeling, where a high-resolution short-term context window ensures fine-grained temporal consistency, while an unlimited long-term context window encodes long-range information using fewer tokens. With this approach, we can train on long video sequences with a manageable token context length. We demonstrate that FAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both short- and long-video generation, providing a simple yet effective baseline for video autoregressive modeling.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025 2

Seer: Language Instructed Video Prediction with Latent Diffusion Models

Imagining the future trajectory is the key for robots to make sound planning and successfully reach their goals. Therefore, text-conditioned video prediction (TVP) is an essential task to facilitate general robot policy learning. To tackle this task and empower robots with the ability to foresee the future, we propose a sample and computation-efficient model, named Seer, by inflating the pretrained text-to-image (T2I) stable diffusion models along the temporal axis. We enhance the U-Net and language conditioning model by incorporating computation-efficient spatial-temporal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Frame Sequential Text Decomposer module that dissects a sentence's global instruction into temporally aligned sub-instructions, ensuring precise integration into each frame of generation. Our framework allows us to effectively leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in pretrained T2I models across the frames. With the adaptable-designed architecture, Seer makes it possible to generate high-fidelity, coherent, and instruction-aligned video frames by fine-tuning a few layers on a small amount of data. The experimental results on Something Something V2 (SSv2), Bridgedata and EpicKitchens-100 datasets demonstrate our superior video prediction performance with around 480-GPU hours versus CogVideo with over 12,480-GPU hours: achieving the 31% FVD improvement compared to the current SOTA model on SSv2 and 83.7% average preference in the human evaluation.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 26, 2023

FilmWorld: Agentic Novel-to-Film Generation through Dynamic Cinematic World Modeling

Translating novels into films poses a grand challenge for generative artificial intelligence, requiring conversion of abstract literary prose into long-form, multi-scene visual narratives. While current video generation models excel at short, single-scene clips within narrow temporal and spatial contexts, novel-to-film generation operates in a more complex regime, demanding long-duration content across diverse scenes with dynamically evolving entity states. To address this, we formalize novel-to-film generation as dynamic cinematic world modeling, decomposed into two phases: construction, which grounds abstract, underspecified literary narratives into concrete, stateful, and persistent world entities; and evolution, which governs how these entities dynamically update under plot progression to maintain causal consistency across scenes. We propose FilmWorld, an end-to-end agentic system where two groups of specialized agents collaborate to instantiate these phases. Construction-side agents perform narrative structured translation, world entity state modeling with visual anchoring, and state-driven shot planning, progressively projecting literary language into a cinematic blueprint. Evolution-side agents perform state-anchored visual generation, cross-shot dynamic state propagation, and closed-loop state verification to maintain causal consistency and visual coherence. To address the evaluation gap in long-form generation, we introduce FilmEval, a systematic evaluation framework that couples a difficulty-graded benchmark of 15 representative novels with an automated protocol of nine objective metrics spanning three dimensions: cinematic presentation, film consistency, and novel fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that FilmWorld consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video generation agent systems, with particularly pronounced improvements in narrative fidelity and cross-scene consistency.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 20 2

Can World Simulators Reason? Gen-ViRe: A Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables sophisticated symbolic reasoning in LLMs, it remains confined to discrete text and cannot simulate the continuous, physics-governed dynamics of the real world. Recent video generation models have emerged as potential world simulators through Chain-of-Frames (CoF) reasoning -- materializing thought as frame-by-frame visual sequences, with each frame representing a physically-grounded reasoning step. Despite compelling demonstrations, a challenge persists: existing benchmarks, focusing on fidelity or alignment, do not assess CoF reasoning and thus cannot measure core cognitive abilities in multi-step planning, algorithmic logic, or abstract pattern extrapolation. This evaluation void prevents systematic understanding of model capabilities and principled guidance for improvement. We introduce Gen-ViRe (Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark), a framework grounded in cognitive science and real-world AI applications, which decomposes CoF reasoning into six cognitive dimensions -- from perceptual logic to abstract planning -- and 24 subtasks. Through multi-source data curation, minimal prompting protocols, and hybrid VLM-assisted evaluation with detailed criteria, Gen-ViRe delivers the first quantitative assessment of video models as reasoners. Our experiments on SOTA systems reveal substantial discrepancies between impressive visual quality and actual reasoning depth, establishing baselines and diagnostic tools to advance genuine world simulators.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025 3

From Watch to Imagine: Steering Long-horizon Manipulation via Human Demonstration and Future Envisionment

Generalizing to long-horizon manipulation tasks in a zero-shot setting remains a central challenge in robotics. Current multimodal foundation based approaches, despite their capabilities, typically fail to decompose high-level commands into executable action sequences from static visual input alone. To address this challenge, we introduce Super-Mimic, a hierarchical framework that enables zero-shot robotic imitation by directly inferring procedural intent from unscripted human demonstration videos. Our framework is composed of two sequential modules. First, a Human Intent Translator (HIT) parses the input video using multimodal reasoning to produce a sequence of language-grounded subtasks. These subtasks then condition a Future Dynamics Predictor (FDP), which employs a generative model that synthesizes a physically plausible video rollout for each step. The resulting visual trajectories are dynamics-aware, explicitly modeling crucial object interactions and contact points to guide the low-level controller. We validate this approach through extensive experiments on a suite of long-horizon manipulation tasks, where Super-Mimic significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by over 20%. These results establish that coupling video-driven intent parsing with prospective dynamics modeling is a highly effective strategy for developing general-purpose robotic systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integration

Recent advances in Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have revolutionized human-centric video synthesis, yet fine-grained and independent editing of subjects and scenes remains a critical challenge. Recent attempts to incorporate richer environment control through rigid 3D geometric compositions often encounter a stark trade-off between precise control and generative flexibility. Furthermore, the heavy 3D pre-processing still limits practical scalability. In this paper, we propose ONE-SHOT, a parameter-efficient framework for compositional human-environment video generation. Our key insight is to factorize the generative process into disentangled signals. Specifically, we introduce a canonical-space injection mechanism that decouples human dynamics from environmental cues via cross-attention. We also propose Dynamic-Grounded-RoPE, a novel positional embedding strategy that establishes spatial correspondences between disparate spatial domains without any heuristic 3D alignments. To support long-horizon synthesis, we introduce a Hybrid Context Integration mechanism to maintain subject and scene consistency across minute-level generations. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering superior structural control and creative diversity for video synthesis. Our project has been available on: https://martayang.github.io/ONE-SHOT/.

Privileged Foresight Distillation: Zero-Cost Future Correction for World Action Models

World action models jointly predict future video and action during training, raising an open question about what role the future-prediction branch actually plays. A recent finding shows that this branch can be removed at inference with little to no loss on common manipulation benchmarks, suggesting that future information may act merely as a regularizer on the shared visual backbone. We propose instead that joint training induces an action-conditioned correction that privileged future observations impose on action denoising, and that current-only policies capture this correction only partially. Making the account precise, we formulate privileged foresight as a residual in the action-denoising direction -- the difference between what a model predicts given the true future and what it predicts given only the current frame -- and introduce Privileged Foresight Distillation (PFD), which transfers this residual from a training-time teacher into a small adapter on a current-only student. The teacher and student share the same backbone and differ only in the attention mask over video tokens; future video is never generated at inference. Controlled experiments verify that this gain reflects a genuine future-conditioned correction rather than a side effect of capacity or regularization. Empirically, PFD achieves consistent improvements on LIBERO and RoboTwin manipulation benchmarks while preserving the current-only inference interface at negligible added latency. This view reframes the role of future information in world action models: not as a target to predict, nor as a regularizer to absorb, but as a compressible correction to be distilled.

  • 3 authors
·
May 1

PhysisForcing: Physics Reinforced World Simulator for Robotic Manipulation

Video generation models have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied world simulation. However, both general-domain video generators and robot-specific data fine-tuned models can still produce physically implausible manipulations, including discontinuous motion trajectories and inconsistent robot-object interactions, which limits their reliability as world simulators. Through extensive experiments, we find that such physical instability mainly arises from two factors: deformation of moving objects and implausible spatio-temporal correlations among interacting entities, particularly during contact. Building on this observation, we propose PhysisForcing, a scalable training framework that strengthens physical consistency by focusing supervision on physics-informative regions through joint optimization of pixel-level and semantic-level features. The framework consists of a pixel-level trajectory alignment loss, which supervises DiT features using reference point trajectories, and a semantic-level relational alignment loss, which aligns DiT features with inter-region relations extracted from a frozen video understanding encoder. Extensive experiments on R-Bench, PAI-Bench, and EZS-Bench show that PhysisForcing consistently improves embodied video generation over strong baselines, improving the Wan2.2-I2V-A14B and Cosmos3-Nano base models on R-Bench by 22.3\% and 9.2\% (7.1\% and 3.7\% over vanilla finetuning), with the Cosmos3-Nano variant attaining the best overall score. Beyond generation, as a world model under the WorldArena action-planner protocol it raises the closed-loop success rate from 16.0\% to 24.0\% and further improves downstream policy success, indicating that physically aligned video models yield stronger representations for robotic manipulation.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Jun 25 1

Cognitively Inspired Energy-Based World Models

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 7

Generative Pre-Trained Diffusion Paradigm for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, generative pre-trained paradigms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) have achieved revolutionary advancements and widespread real-world applications. Particularly, the emergence of pre-trained LLMs-based temporal works, compared to previous deep model approaches, has demonstrated superior generalization and robustness, showcasing the potential of generative pre-trained paradigms as foundation models for time series. However, those LLMs-based works mainly focus on cross-modal research, i.e., leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs in time series contexts. Although they have achieved impressive performance, there still exist the issues of concept drift caused by differences in data distribution and inflexibility caused by misalignment of dimensions. To this end, inspired by recent work on LVMs, we reconsider the paradigm of time series modeling. In this paper, we comprehensively explore, for the first time, the effectiveness and superiority of the Generative Pre-trained Diffusion (GPD) paradigm in real-world multivariate time series forecasting (TSF). Specifically, to mitigate performance bias introduced by sophisticated networks, we propose a straightforward MLP diffusion network for unconditional modeling of time series. Then we employ a zero-shot and tuning-free method to predict (generate) future data using historical data as prompts. The GPD paradigm is established on the time series modality, effectively preventing the phenomenon of concept drift, and enabling flexible forecasting of arbitrary lengths. We demonstrate that the GPD paradigm achieves comprehensive performance and generalization comparable to current SOTA LLM-based and deep model paradigms on mainstream benchmarks and various TSF tasks. Extensive experiments validate the potential of the GPD paradigm and its assistance in future related research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3, 2025 3

VideoWeaver: Multimodal Multi-View Video-to-Video Transfer for Embodied Agents

Recent progress in video-to-video (V2V) translation has enabled realistic resimulation of embodied AI demonstrations, a capability that allows pretrained robot policies to be transferable to new environments without additional data collection. However, prior works can only operate on a single view at a time, while embodied AI tasks are commonly captured from multiple synchronized cameras to support policy learning. Naively applying single-view models independently to each camera leads to inconsistent appearance across views, and standard transformer architectures do not scale to multi-view settings due to the quadratic cost of cross-view attention. We present VideoWeaver, the first multimodal multi-view V2V translation framework. VideoWeaver is initially trained as a single-view flow-based V2V model. To achieve an extension to the multi-view regime, we propose to ground all views in a shared 4D latent space derived from a feed-forward spatial foundation model, namely, Pi3. This encourages view-consistent appearance even under wide baselines and dynamic camera motion. To scale beyond a fixed number of cameras, we train views at distinct diffusion timesteps, enabling the model to learn both joint and conditional view distributions. This in turn allows autoregressive synthesis of new viewpoints conditioned on existing ones. Experiments show superior or similar performance to the state-of-the-art on the single-view translation benchmarks and, for the first time, physically and stylistically consistent multi-view translations, including challenging egocentric and heterogeneous-camera setups central to world randomization for robot learning.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 25

SkyReels-V2: Infinite-length Film Generative Model

Recent advances in video generation have been driven by diffusion models and autoregressive frameworks, yet critical challenges persist in harmonizing prompt adherence, visual quality, motion dynamics, and duration: compromises in motion dynamics to enhance temporal visual quality, constrained video duration (5-10 seconds) to prioritize resolution, and inadequate shot-aware generation stemming from general-purpose MLLMs' inability to interpret cinematic grammar, such as shot composition, actor expressions, and camera motions. These intertwined limitations hinder realistic long-form synthesis and professional film-style generation. To address these limitations, we propose SkyReels-V2, an Infinite-length Film Generative Model, that synergizes Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM), Multi-stage Pretraining, Reinforcement Learning, and Diffusion Forcing Framework. Firstly, we design a comprehensive structural representation of video that combines the general descriptions by the Multi-modal LLM and the detailed shot language by sub-expert models. Aided with human annotation, we then train a unified Video Captioner, named SkyCaptioner-V1, to efficiently label the video data. Secondly, we establish progressive-resolution pretraining for the fundamental video generation, followed by a four-stage post-training enhancement: Initial concept-balanced Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) improves baseline quality; Motion-specific Reinforcement Learning (RL) training with human-annotated and synthetic distortion data addresses dynamic artifacts; Our diffusion forcing framework with non-decreasing noise schedules enables long-video synthesis in an efficient search space; Final high-quality SFT refines visual fidelity. All the code and models are available at https://github.com/SkyworkAI/SkyReels-V2.

  • 25 authors
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Apr 17, 2025 2

Temporal In-Context Fine-Tuning for Versatile Control of Video Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-video diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, but controllable generation remains challenging, particularly under limited data and compute. Existing fine-tuning methods for conditional generation often rely on external encoders or architectural modifications, which demand large datasets and are typically restricted to spatially aligned conditioning, limiting flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce Temporal In-Context Fine-Tuning (TIC-FT), an efficient and versatile approach for adapting pretrained video diffusion models to diverse conditional generation tasks. Our key idea is to concatenate condition and target frames along the temporal axis and insert intermediate buffer frames with progressively increasing noise levels. These buffer frames enable smooth transitions, aligning the fine-tuning process with the pretrained model's temporal dynamics. TIC-FT requires no architectural changes and achieves strong performance with as few as 10-30 training samples. We validate our method across a range of tasks, including image-to-video and video-to-video generation, using large-scale base models such as CogVideoX-5B and Wan-14B. Extensive experiments show that TIC-FT outperforms existing baselines in both condition fidelity and visual quality, while remaining highly efficient in both training and inference. For additional results, visit https://kinam0252.github.io/TIC-FT/

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025 3

RealCam: Real-Time Novel-View Video Generation with Interactive Camera Control

Camera-controlled video-to-video (V2V) generation enables dynamic viewpoint synthesis from monocular footage, holding immense potential for interactive filmmaking and live broadcasting. However, existing implicit synthesis methods fundamentally rely on non-causal, full-sequence processing and rigid prefix-style temporal concatenation. This architectural paradigm mandates bidirectional attention, resulting in prohibitive computational latency, quadratic complexity scaling, and inherent incompatibility with real-time streaming or variable-length inputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RealCam, a novel autoregressive framework for interactive, real-time camera-controlled V2V generation. We first design a high-fidelity teacher model grounded in a Cross-frame In-context Learning paradigm. By interleaving source and target frames into synchronized contextual pairs, our design inherently enables length-agnostic generalization and naturally facilitates causal adaptation, breaking the rigid prefix bottleneck. We then distill this teacher into a few-step causal student via Self-Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling efficient, on-the-fly streaming synthesis. Furthermore, to mitigate severe loop inconsistency in closed-loop trajectories, we propose Loop-Closed Data Augmentation (LoopAug), a novel paradigm that synthesizes globally consistent loop sequences from existing multiview datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealCam achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity and temporal consistency while enabling truly interactive camera control with orders-of-magnitude faster inference than existing paradigms. Our project page is at https://xyc-fly.github.io/RealCam/.

  • 8 authors
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May 6

Video Generation Models in Robotics -- Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions

Video generation models have emerged as high-fidelity models of the physical world, capable of synthesizing high-quality videos capturing fine-grained interactions between agents and their environments conditioned on multi-modal user inputs. Their impressive capabilities address many of the long-standing challenges faced by physics-based simulators, driving broad adoption in many problem domains, e.g., robotics. For example, video models enable photorealistic, physically consistent deformable-body simulation without making prohibitive simplifying assumptions, which is a major bottleneck in physics-based simulation. Moreover, video models can serve as foundation world models that capture the dynamics of the world in a fine-grained and expressive way. They thus overcome the limited expressiveness of language-only abstractions in describing intricate physical interactions. In this survey, we provide a review of video models and their applications as embodied world models in robotics, encompassing cost-effective data generation and action prediction in imitation learning, dynamics and rewards modeling in reinforcement learning, visual planning, and policy evaluation. Further, we highlight important challenges hindering the trustworthy integration of video models in robotics, which include poor instruction following, hallucinations such as violations of physics, and unsafe content generation, in addition to fundamental limitations such as significant data curation, training, and inference costs. We present potential future directions to address these open research challenges to motivate research and ultimately facilitate broader applications, especially in safety-critical settings.

  • 12 authors
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Jan 12

Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Video Anomaly Detection

Detecting abnormal activities in real-world surveillance videos is an important yet challenging task as the prior knowledge about video anomalies is usually limited or unavailable. Despite that many approaches have been developed to resolve this problem, few of them can capture the normal spatio-temporal patterns effectively and efficiently. Moreover, existing works seldom explicitly consider the local consistency at frame level and global coherence of temporal dynamics in video sequences. To this end, we propose Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks (CT-D2GAN) to perform unsupervised video anomaly detection. Specifically, we first present a convolutional transformer to perform future frame prediction. It contains three key components, i.e., a convolutional encoder to capture the spatial information of the input video clips, a temporal self-attention module to encode the temporal dynamics, and a convolutional decoder to integrate spatio-temporal features and predict the future frame. Next, a dual discriminator based adversarial training procedure, which jointly considers an image discriminator that can maintain the local consistency at frame-level and a video discriminator that can enforce the global coherence of temporal dynamics, is employed to enhance the future frame prediction. Finally, the prediction error is used to identify abnormal video frames. Thoroughly empirical studies on three public video anomaly detection datasets, i.e., UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and Shanghai Tech Campus, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adversarial spatio-temporal modeling framework.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2021

Physically Native World Models: A Hamiltonian Perspective on Generative World Modeling

World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose Hamiltonian World Models as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.

  • 2 authors
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Apr 30

DreaMontage: Arbitrary Frame-Guided One-Shot Video Generation

The "one-shot" technique represents a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic in filmmaking. However, its practical realization is often hindered by prohibitive costs and complex real-world constraints. Although emerging video generation models offer a virtual alternative, existing approaches typically rely on naive clip concatenation, which frequently fails to maintain visual smoothness and temporal coherence. In this paper, we introduce DreaMontage, a comprehensive framework designed for arbitrary frame-guided generation, capable of synthesizing seamless, expressive, and long-duration one-shot videos from diverse user-provided inputs. To achieve this, we address the challenge through three primary dimensions. (i) We integrate a lightweight intermediate-conditioning mechanism into the DiT architecture. By employing an Adaptive Tuning strategy that effectively leverages base training data, we unlock robust arbitrary-frame control capabilities. (ii) To enhance visual fidelity and cinematic expressiveness, we curate a high-quality dataset and implement a Visual Expression SFT stage. In addressing critical issues such as subject motion rationality and transition smoothness, we apply a Tailored DPO scheme, which significantly improves the success rate and usability of the generated content. (iii) To facilitate the production of extended sequences, we design a Segment-wise Auto-Regressive (SAR) inference strategy that operates in a memory-efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves visually striking and seamlessly coherent one-shot effects while maintaining computational efficiency, empowering users to transform fragmented visual materials into vivid, cohesive one-shot cinematic experiences.

ByteDance ByteDance
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Dec 24, 2025 2

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

Towards Physically Plausible Video Generation via VLM Planning

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling the generation of highly realistic videos and drawing the attention of the community in their potential as world simulators. However, despite their capabilities, VDMs often fail to produce physically plausible videos due to an inherent lack of understanding of physics, resulting in incorrect dynamics and event sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-stage image-to-video generation framework that explicitly incorporates physics. In the first stage, we employ a Vision Language Model (VLM) as a coarse-grained motion planner, integrating chain-of-thought and physics-aware reasoning to predict a rough motion trajectories/changes that approximate real-world physical dynamics while ensuring the inter-frame consistency. In the second stage, we use the predicted motion trajectories/changes to guide the video generation of a VDM. As the predicted motion trajectories/changes are rough, noise is added during inference to provide freedom to the VDM in generating motion with more fine details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce physically plausible motion, and comparative evaluations highlight the notable superiority of our approach over existing methods. More video results are available on our Project Page: https://madaoer.github.io/projects/physically_plausible_video_generation.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 30, 2025 3