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This survey reviews recent advances in surgical video generation, categorizing methods into unconditional, conditional, and world modeling generation. It highlights a shift from creating visually plausible frames to modeling the causal dynamics of surgical scenes, and discusses challenges such as pixel-level fidelity versus clinical plausibility, generalization, physical realism, controllability, and interpretability. The paper also compiles experimental results from public datasets to serve as a quantitative benchmark for the field.
arXiv:2603. 26720v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting surgical needle trajectories from endoscopic video is critical for robot-assisted suturing, enabling anticipatory planning, real-time guidance, and safer motion execution.
arXiv:2608. 11204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.
Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.
Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation. Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions.
arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.