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.
Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions. However, existing evaluations of physical fidelity are often conducted in isolation and rely heavily on perceptual similarity or human judgments, providing limited insight into which physical principles or parameters are violated.
Training and evaluating spatial reasoning in embodied agents requires diverse environments that are both geometrically faithful and semantically queryable. Synthetic simulators offer ground truth semantics but sacrifice realism; simulators based on reconstructions of real-world environments have realistic appearance but lack ground truth semantics by default.
arXiv:2602. 08058v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of occlusions and measurement noise, geometrically accurate scene reconstructions -- which fit the sensor data -- can still be physically incorrect.
By Xihang Yu, Rajat Talak, Lorenzo Shaikewitz, Luca Carlone
arXiv:2608. 05948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions.
By Shuai Wang, Yaxin Feng, Xuekun Jiang, Shihan Tian, Ningyu Yan, Xing Shen, Chaoyang Lyu, Hui Wang, Yunsong Zhou, Hanqing Wang, Jiangmiao Pang, Yang Xiang, Xing Gao, Chunhua Shen, Weinan Zhang
arXiv:2607. 10190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on video understanding and visual question answering, yet they remain unreliable in reasoning about physical plausibility, where understanding object interactions, causal dynamics, and fundamental physical principles is essential.
By Wenyuan Wang, Lianyu Hu, Hao Wang, Yang Liu