arXiv AI

PAWBench: How Far Are We from Probabilistically Aligned World Modeling?

PAWBench introduces a benchmark to evaluate whether video generation models can act as probabilistically aligned world models, meaning they should reproduce not just plausible trajectories but the full distribution of possible behaviors from the same initial conditions. The authors formalize probabilistic alignment as a distributional criterion and provide PAWEval, an outcome-level protocol that turns repeated video rollouts into empirical distributions over physical behaviors. Across 50 scenarios and eleven current systems, none consistently matched reference probabilities or captured the full range of valid behaviors, highlighting a significant gap in current video generators.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Video Generation Models: A Survey of Post-Training and Alignment

arXiv:2610.00812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video generation has rapidly progressed from short, low-quality clips to high-resolution, long-duration sequences with complex spatiotemporal dynamic...

By Chaoyu Li, Xiaoyi Gu, Yogesh Kulkarni, Eun Woo Im, Mohammadmahdi Honarmand, Zeyu Wang, Juntong Song, Fei Du, Xilin Jiang, Kexin Zheng, Tianzhi Li, Fei Tao, Pooyan Fazli
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

SolarWM: Open Data and Scalable Training for Long-Horizon Video World Models

SolarWM is an open foundation for building interactive video world models, offering a reconfigurable multi‑source data engine that unifies 1.43 million clips from 10 datasets into a consistent, frame‑aligned format. It provides a backbone‑native adaptation framework that preserves native representations of models ranging from 5 B to 33 B parameters, and a three‑stage training recipe combining bidirectional adaptation, teacher‑forced autoregressive initialization, and distribution‑matching distillation. The resulting causal models can interact in real‑time over rollouts from minutes to hours, trained only on 5‑second sequences, and the project releases data, pipeline, recipes, weights, and framework for reproducible research.

By Junchao Huang, Guian Fang, Shengju Qian, Xianghao Kong, Zhuoran Zhao, Wei Huang, Yihua Du, Zixin Zhang, Justin Cui, Yuchao Gu, Yukang Chen, Xinting Hu, Tianyu He, Shaoshuai Shi, Zhuotao Tian, Xin Wang, Mike Zheng Shou, Li Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

WorldAgen: Unified State-Action Prediction with Test-Time World Model Training

WorldAgen is a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction using a shared Transformer backbone with two specialized heads. It introduces a Mixed Unidirectional Attention Mask to separate the world model and agent model, and enables Test-Time Training (TTT) by sampling exploratory actions and updating the world model with real state transitions. Experiments on CALVIN and LIBERO show that WorldAgen matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods, especially when TTT is applied to a few samples.

By Chi Wan, Kangrui Wang, Yuan Si, Pingyue Zhang, Manling Li
arXiv AI
Aug 18

CaliBench: Are the Stochastic Dynamics of Video World Models Physically Calibrated?

arXiv:2608. 16829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video world models approximate the stochastic distribution of physical outcomes through generative sampling, but existing benchmarks score individual generations or compare distributions coarsely over a whole dataset, leaving the fine-grained aleatoric uncertainty of specific phenomena untested.

By Jonathan Sadeghi, Jenny Seidenschwarz, Jesse Allardice, Sirish Srinivasan, Benjamin Graham, Jeffrey Hawke
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Human-Level Accuracy, Non-Human Strategies: Revealing Model-Human Divergence in Video Physical Reasoning

Video foundation models now match human accuracy on physical‑reasoning benchmarks, but a new distributional evaluation framework shows that their predictions diverge markedly from human judgments. On the Physion benchmark, ViT‑L models such as V‑JEPA2, VideoMAE‑v2, and DINOv2 achieve near‑human accuracy yet exhibit a 26.4% model‑human disagreement, far above the 4.8% human‑human disagreement, and lower agreement (kappa ~0.48 vs. 0.91). The divergence varies by task: models excel at geometric reasoning but lag on gravitational dynamics and causal chains, indicating they rely on statistical regularities rather than explicit forward simulation.

By Fanhong Li, Shurui Zheng, Zi Yin, Junbo Cui, Lei Ji, Jia Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Foresight at the Event Boundary: Evaluating Physical Prediction in Video World Models

The paper introduces an event‑anchored evaluation protocol for video world models, using 62 free‑fall recordings and 124 clips with detailed release and impact annotations. It finds that while some models (Runway, Veo) can generate release and impact events with high accuracy, they often start them late, and others (Cosmos‑Predict‑2.5, MAGI‑1) rarely produce measurable consequences. A human study shows that people’s predictions align with recorded futures but also reveal ambiguity in plausible continuations, highlighting that physical foresight requires initiating, timing, and realizing motion correctly.

By Estela Monserrat Arriaga Santana (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Julian Rosas Scull (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Eh\'ecatl Sacamch'en N\'u\~nez Rico (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Hugo Jair Escalante (University of Texas at El Paso)
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Thinking in Video: Can Video Generators Really Reason About the Real World?

arXiv:2607. 17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in world models and video generation have given rise to an emerging reasoning paradigm that leverages video generative models to simulate, predict, and reason about real-world dynamics.

By Yongheng Zhang, Guang Yang, Ruihan Hou, Qiguang Chen, Ziang Liu, Xiaolong Liu, Manman Zhang, Yanchao Hao, Zheng Wei, Hao Wu, Libo Qin, Peishan Dai, Yinghui Li, Di Yin, Xing Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning

arXiv:2608.24885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on a...

By Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu, Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Siyuan Qian, Hao Chen, Jiajun Cao, Jian Tang, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

AlayaWorld: Interactive Long-Horizon World Modeling -- Full Technical Report

arXiv:2607. 18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike conventional video game development, which relies on labor-intensive pipelines for asset production, animation, physics, and programming, video world models generate interactive environments from user inputs instantly.

By AlayaWorld Team, Kaipeng Zhang, Chuanhao Li, Yifan Zhan, Yongtao Ge, Yuanyang Yin, Jiaming Tan, Kang He, Liaoyuan Fan, Mingliang Zhai, Ruicong Liu, Xiaojie Xu, Xuangeng Chu, Zhen Li, Zhengyuan Lin, Zhixiang Wang, Zian Meng, Zihui Gao