Daily Papers

Dynamic 3D reconstruction and point tracking in videos are typically treated as separate tasks, despite their deep connection. We propose St4RTrack, a feed-forward framework that simultaneously reconstructs and tracks dynamic video content in a world coordinate frame from RGB inputs. This is achieved by predicting two appropriately defined pointmaps for a pair of frames captured at different moments. Specifically, we predict both pointmaps at the same moment, in the same world, capturing both static and dynamic scene geometry while maintaining 3D correspondences. Chaining these predictions through the video sequence with respect to a reference frame naturally computes long-range correspondences, effectively combining 3D reconstruction with 3D tracking. Unlike prior methods that rely heavily on 4D ground truth supervision, we employ a novel adaptation scheme based on a reprojection loss. We establish a new extensive benchmark for world-frame reconstruction and tracking, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our unified, data-driven framework. Our code, model, and benchmark will be released.

Human behaviors in the real world naturally encode rich, long-term contextual information that can be leveraged to train embodied agents for perception, understanding, and acting. However, existing capture systems typically rely on costly studio setups and wearable devices, limiting the large-scale collection of scene-conditioned human motion data in the wild. To address this, we propose EmbodMocap, a portable and affordable data collection pipeline using two moving iPhones. Our key idea is to jointly calibrate dual RGB-D sequences to reconstruct both humans and scenes within a unified metric world coordinate frame. The proposed method allows metric-scale and scene-consistent capture in everyday environments without static cameras or markers, bridging human motion and scene geometry seamlessly. Compared with optical capture ground truth, we demonstrate that the dual-view setting exhibits a remarkable ability to mitigate depth ambiguity, achieving superior alignment and reconstruction performance over single iphone or monocular models. Based on the collected data, we empower three embodied AI tasks: monocular human-scene-reconstruction, where we fine-tune on feedforward models that output metric-scale, world-space aligned humans and scenes; physics-based character animation, where we prove our data could be used to scale human-object interaction skills and scene-aware motion tracking; and robot motion control, where we train a humanoid robot via sim-to-real RL to replicate human motions depicted in videos. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pipeline and its contributions towards advancing embodied AI research.

Monocular 3D tracking aims to capture the long-term motion of pixels in 3D space from a single monocular video and has witnessed rapid progress in recent years. However, we argue that the existing monocular 3D tracking methods still fall short in separating the camera motion from foreground dynamic motion and cannot densely track newly emerging dynamic subjects in the videos. To address these two limitations, we propose TrackingWorld, a novel pipeline for dense 3D tracking of almost all pixels within a world-centric 3D coordinate system. First, we introduce a tracking upsampler that efficiently lifts the arbitrary sparse 2D tracks into dense 2D tracks. Then, to generalize the current tracking methods to newly emerging objects, we apply the upsampler to all frames and reduce the redundancy of 2D tracks by eliminating the tracks in overlapped regions. Finally, we present an efficient optimization-based framework to back-project dense 2D tracks into world-centric 3D trajectories by estimating the camera poses and the 3D coordinates of these 2D tracks. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our system achieves accurate and dense 3D tracking in a world-centric coordinate frame.

Accurate camera motion estimation is essential for recovering global human motion in world coordinates from RGB video inputs. SLAM is widely used for estimating camera trajectory and point cloud, but monocular SLAM does so only up to an unknown scale factor. Previous works estimate the scale factor through optimization, but this is unreliable and time-consuming. This paper presents an optimization-free scale calibration framework, Human as Checkerboard (HAC). HAC innovatively leverages the human body predicted by human mesh recovery model as a calibration reference. Specifically, it uses the absolute depth of human-scene contact joints as references to calibrate the corresponding relative scene depth from SLAM. HAC benefits from geometric priors encoded in human mesh recovery models to estimate the SLAM scale and achieves precise global human motion estimation. Simple yet powerful, our method sets a new state-of-the-art performance for global human mesh estimation tasks, reducing motion errors by 50% over prior local-to-global methods while using 100times less inference time than optimization-based methods. Project page: https://martayang.github.io/HAC.

We present EgoAllo, a system for human motion estimation from a head-mounted device. Using only egocentric SLAM poses and images, EgoAllo guides sampling from a conditional diffusion model to estimate 3D body pose, height, and hand parameters that capture the wearer's actions in the allocentric coordinate frame of the scene. To achieve this, our key insight is in representation: we propose spatial and temporal invariance criteria for improving model performance, from which we derive a head motion conditioning parameterization that improves estimation by up to 18%. We also show how the bodies estimated by our system can improve the hands: the resulting kinematic and temporal constraints result in over 40% lower hand estimation errors compared to noisy monocular estimates. Project page: https://egoallo.github.io/

Realtime 4D reconstruction for dynamic scenes remains a crucial challenge for autonomous driving perception. Most existing methods rely on depth estimation through self-supervision or multi-modality sensor fusion. In this paper, we propose Driv3R, a DUSt3R-based framework that directly regresses per-frame point maps from multi-view image sequences. To achieve streaming dense reconstruction, we maintain a memory pool to reason both spatial relationships across sensors and dynamic temporal contexts to enhance multi-view 3D consistency and temporal integration. Furthermore, we employ a 4D flow predictor to identify moving objects within the scene to direct our network focus more on reconstructing these dynamic regions. Finally, we align all per-frame pointmaps consistently to the world coordinate system in an optimization-free manner. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Driv3R outperforms previous frameworks in 4D dynamic scene reconstruction, achieving 15x faster inference speed compared to methods requiring global alignment. Code: https://github.com/Barrybarry-Smith/Driv3R.

Recent progress in text-to-video generation has achieved remarkable realism, yet fine-grained control over camera motion and orientation remains elusive. Existing approaches typically encode camera trajectories through relative or ambiguous representations, limiting explicit geometric control. We introduce GimbalDiffusion, a framework that enables camera control grounded in physical-world coordinates, using gravity as a global reference. Instead of describing motion relative to previous frames, our method defines camera trajectories in an absolute coordinate system, allowing precise and interpretable control over camera parameters without requiring an initial reference frame. We leverage panoramic 360-degree videos to construct a wide variety of camera trajectories, well beyond the predominantly straight, forward-facing trajectories seen in conventional video data. To further enhance camera guidance, we introduce null-pitch conditioning, an annotation strategy that reduces the model's reliance on text content when conflicting with camera specifications (e.g., generating grass while the camera points towards the sky). Finally, we establish a benchmark for camera-aware video generation by rebalancing SpatialVID-HQ for comprehensive evaluation under wide camera pitch variation. Together, these contributions advance the controllability and robustness of text-to-video models, enabling precise, gravity-aligned camera manipulation within generative frameworks.

In this paper, we present a novel framework designed to reconstruct long-sequence 3D human motion in the world coordinates from in-the-wild videos with multiple shot transitions. Such long-sequence in-the-wild motions are highly valuable to applications such as motion generation and motion understanding, but are of great challenge to be recovered due to abrupt shot transitions, partial occlusions, and dynamic backgrounds presented in such videos. Existing methods primarily focus on single-shot videos, where continuity is maintained within a single camera view, or simplify multi-shot alignment in camera space only. In this work, we tackle the challenges by integrating an enhanced camera pose estimation with Human Motion Recovery (HMR) by incorporating a shot transition detector and a robust alignment module for accurate pose and orientation continuity across shots. By leveraging a custom motion integrator, we effectively mitigate the problem of foot sliding and ensure temporal consistency in human pose. Extensive evaluations on our created multi-shot dataset from public 3D human datasets demonstrate the robustness of our method in reconstructing realistic human motion in world coordinates.

Diverse, accurately labeled 3D human pose data is expensive and studio-bound, while in-the-wild datasets lack known ground truth. We introduce UnrealPose-Gen, an Unreal Engine 5 pipeline built on Movie Render Queue for high-quality offline rendering. Our generated frames include: (i) 3D joints in world and camera coordinates, (ii) 2D projections and COCO-style keypoints with occlusion and joint-visibility flags, (iii) person bounding boxes, and (iv) camera intrinsics and extrinsics. We use UnrealPose-Gen to present UnrealPose-1M, an approximately one million frame corpus comprising eight sequences: five scripted "coherent" sequences spanning five scenes, approximately 40 actions, and five subjects; and three randomized sequences across three scenes, approximately 100 actions, and five subjects, all captured from diverse camera trajectories for broad viewpoint coverage. As a fidelity check, we report real-to-synthetic results on four tasks: image-to-3D pose, 2D keypoint detection, 2D-to-3D lifting, and person detection/segmentation. Though time and resources constrain us from an unlimited dataset, we release the UnrealPose-1M dataset, as well as the UnrealPose-Gen pipeline to support third-party generation of human pose data.

We present a novel method for recovering world-grounded human motion from monocular video. The main challenge lies in the ambiguity of defining the world coordinate system, which varies between sequences. Previous approaches attempt to alleviate this issue by predicting relative motion in an autoregressive manner, but are prone to accumulating errors. Instead, we propose estimating human poses in a novel Gravity-View (GV) coordinate system, which is defined by the world gravity and the camera view direction. The proposed GV system is naturally gravity-aligned and uniquely defined for each video frame, largely reducing the ambiguity of learning image-pose mapping. The estimated poses can be transformed back to the world coordinate system using camera rotations, forming a global motion sequence. Additionally, the per-frame estimation avoids error accumulation in the autoregressive methods. Experiments on in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate that our method recovers more realistic motion in both the camera space and world-grounded settings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/gvhmr/.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have set new benchmarks in image and video generation, enabling realistic visual synthesis across single- and multi-frame contexts. However, these models still struggle with efficiently and explicitly generating 3D-consistent content. To address this, we propose World-consistent Video Diffusion (WVD), a novel framework that incorporates explicit 3D supervision using XYZ images, which encode global 3D coordinates for each image pixel. More specifically, we train a diffusion transformer to learn the joint distribution of RGB and XYZ frames. This approach supports multi-task adaptability via a flexible inpainting strategy. For example, WVD can estimate XYZ frames from ground-truth RGB or generate novel RGB frames using XYZ projections along a specified camera trajectory. In doing so, WVD unifies tasks like single-image-to-3D generation, multi-view stereo, and camera-controlled video generation. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, providing a scalable solution for 3D-consistent video and image generation with a single pretrained model.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, yet they often rely on external context to handle complex tasks. While retrieval-augmented frameworks traditionally focus on selecting top-ranked documents in a single pass, many real-world scenarios demand compositional retrieval, where multiple sources must be combined in a coordinated manner. In this work, we propose a tri-encoder sequential retriever that models this process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), decomposing the probability of retrieving a set of elements into a sequence of conditional probabilities and allowing each retrieval step to be conditioned on previously selected examples. We train the retriever in two stages: first, we efficiently construct supervised sequential data for initial policy training; we then refine the policy to align with the LLM's preferences using a reward grounded in the structural correspondence of generated programs. Experimental results show that our method consistently and significantly outperforms baselines, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling inter-example dependencies. These findings highlight the potential of compositional retrieval for tasks requiring multiple pieces of evidence or examples.

We present Any4D, a scalable multi-view transformer for metric-scale, dense feed-forward 4D reconstruction. Any4D directly generates per-pixel motion and geometry predictions for N frames, in contrast to prior work that typically focuses on either 2-view dense scene flow or sparse 3D point tracking. Moreover, unlike other recent methods for 4D reconstruction from monocular RGB videos, Any4D can process additional modalities and sensors such as RGB-D frames, IMU-based egomotion, and Radar Doppler measurements, when available. One of the key innovations that allows for such a flexible framework is a modular representation of a 4D scene; specifically, per-view 4D predictions are encoded using a variety of egocentric factors (depthmaps and camera intrinsics) represented in local camera coordinates, and allocentric factors (camera extrinsics and scene flow) represented in global world coordinates. We achieve superior performance across diverse setups - both in terms of accuracy (2-3X lower error) and compute efficiency (15X faster), opening avenues for multiple downstream applications.

Modelling interactions is critical in learning complex dynamical systems, namely systems of interacting objects with highly non-linear and time-dependent behaviour. A large class of such systems can be formalized as geometric graphs, i.e., graphs with nodes positioned in the Euclidean space given an arbitrarily chosen global coordinate system, for instance vehicles in a traffic scene. Notwithstanding the arbitrary global coordinate system, the governing dynamics of the respective dynamical systems are invariant to rotations and translations, also known as Galilean invariance. As ignoring these invariances leads to worse generalization, in this work we propose local coordinate frames per node-object to induce roto-translation invariance to the geometric graph of the interacting dynamical system. Further, the local coordinate frames allow for a natural definition of anisotropic filtering in graph neural networks. Experiments in traffic scenes, 3D motion capture, and colliding particles demonstrate that the proposed approach comfortably outperforms the recent state-of-the-art.

We introduce HY-World 2.0, a multi-modal world model framework that advances our prior project HY-World 1.0. HY-World 2.0 accommodates diverse input modalities, including text prompts, single-view images, multi-view images, and videos, and produces 3D world representations. With text or single-view image inputs, the model performs world generation, synthesizing high-fidelity, navigable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes. This is achieved through a four-stage method: a) Panorama Generation with HY-Pano 2.0, b) Trajectory Planning with WorldNav, c) World Expansion with WorldStereo 2.0, and d) World Composition with WorldMirror 2.0. Specifically, we introduce key innovations to enhance panorama fidelity, enable 3D scene understanding and planning, and upgrade WorldStereo, our keyframe-based view generation model with consistent memory. We also upgrade WorldMirror, a feed-forward model for universal 3D prediction, by refining model architecture and learning strategy, enabling world reconstruction from multi-view images or videos. Also, we introduce WorldLens, a high-performance 3DGS rendering platform featuring a flexible engine-agnostic architecture, automatic IBL lighting, efficient collision detection, and training-rendering co-design, enabling interactive exploration of 3D worlds with character support. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HY-World 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks among open-source approaches, delivering results comparable to the closed-source model Marble. We release all model weights, code, and technical details to facilitate reproducibility and support further research on 3D world models.

Energy-based predictive world models provide a powerful approach for multi-step visual planning by reasoning over latent energy landscapes rather than generating pixels. However, existing approaches face two major challenges: (i) their latent representations are typically learned in Euclidean space, neglecting the underlying geometric and hierarchical structure among states, and (ii) they struggle with long-horizon prediction, which leads to rapid degradation across extended rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GeoWorld, a geometric world model that preserves geometric structure and hierarchical relations through a Hyperbolic JEPA, which maps latent representations from Euclidean space onto hyperbolic manifolds. We further introduce Geometric Reinforcement Learning for energy-based optimization, enabling stable multi-step planning in hyperbolic latent space. Extensive experiments on CrossTask and COIN demonstrate around 3% SR improvement in 3-step planning and 2% SR improvement in 4-step planning compared to the state-of-the-art V-JEPA 2. Project website: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/GeoWorld.

World models play a crucial role in understanding and predicting the dynamics of the world, which is essential for video generation. However, existing world models are confined to specific scenarios such as gaming or driving, limiting their ability to capture the complexity of general world dynamic environments. Therefore, we introduce WorldDreamer, a pioneering world model to foster a comprehensive comprehension of general world physics and motions, which significantly enhances the capabilities of video generation. Drawing inspiration from the success of large language models, WorldDreamer frames world modeling as an unsupervised visual sequence modeling challenge. This is achieved by mapping visual inputs to discrete tokens and predicting the masked ones. During this process, we incorporate multi-modal prompts to facilitate interaction within the world model. Our experiments show that WorldDreamer excels in generating videos across different scenarios, including natural scenes and driving environments. WorldDreamer showcases versatility in executing tasks such as text-to-video conversion, image-tovideo synthesis, and video editing. These results underscore WorldDreamer's effectiveness in capturing dynamic elements within diverse general world environments.

Affordance prediction, which identifies interaction regions on objects based on language instructions, is critical for embodied AI. Prevailing end-to-end models couple high-level reasoning and low-level grounding into a single monolithic pipeline and rely on training over annotated datasets, which leads to poor generalization on novel objects and unseen environments. In this paper, we move beyond this paradigm by proposing A4-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that decouples affordance prediction into a three-stage pipeline. Our framework coordinates specialized foundation models at test time: (1) a Dreamer that employs generative models to visualize how an interaction would look; (2) a Thinker that utilizes large vision-language models to decide what object part to interact with; and (3) a Spotter that orchestrates vision foundation models to precisely locate where the interaction area is. By leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained models without any task-specific fine-tuning, our zero-shot framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrates robust generalization to real-world settings.

A world model is an AI system that simulates how an environment evolves under actions, enabling planning through imagined futures rather than reactive perception. Current world models, however, suffer from visual conflation: the mistaken assumption that high-fidelity video generation implies an understanding of physical and causal dynamics. We show that while modern models excel at predicting pixels, they frequently violate invariant constraints, fail under intervention, and break down in safety-critical decision-making. This survey argues that visual realism is an unreliable proxy for world understanding. Instead, effective world models must encode causal structure, respect domain-specific constraints, and remain stable over long horizons. We propose a reframing of world models as actionable simulators rather than visual engines, emphasizing structured 4D interfaces, constraint-aware dynamics, and closed-loop evaluation. Using medical decision-making as an epistemic stress test, where trial-and-error is impossible and errors are irreversible, we demonstrate that a world model's value is determined not by how realistic its rollouts appear, but by its ability to support counterfactual reasoning, intervention planning, and robust long-horizon foresight.

Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. Project website at https://point-world.github.io/.

Despite impressive progress in video generation, existing models remain limited to surface-level plausibility, lacking a coherent and unified understanding of the world. Prior approaches typically incorporate only a single form of world-related knowledge or rely on rigid alignment strategies to introduce additional knowledge. However, aligning the single world knowledge is insufficient to constitute a world model that requires jointly modeling multiple heterogeneous dimensions (e.g., physical commonsense, 3D and temporal consistency). To address this limitation, we introduce DreamWorld, a unified framework that integrates complementary world knowledge into video generators via a Joint World Modeling Paradigm, jointly predicting video pixels and features from foundation models to capture temporal dynamics, spatial geometry, and semantic consistency. However, naively optimizing these heterogeneous objectives can lead to visual instability and temporal flickering. To mitigate this issue, we propose Consistent Constraint Annealing (CCA) to progressively regulate world-level constraints during training, and Multi-Source Inner-Guidance to enforce learned world priors at inference. Extensive evaluations show that DreamWorld improves world consistency, outperforming Wan2.1 by 2.26 points on VBench. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ABU121111/DreamWorld{mypink{Github}}.

We present InSpatio-WorldFM, an open-source real-time frame model for spatial intelligence. Unlike video-based world models that rely on sequential frame generation and incur substantial latency due to window-level processing, InSpatio-WorldFM adopts a frame-based paradigm that generates each frame independently, enabling low-latency real-time spatial inference. By enforcing multi-view spatial consistency through explicit 3D anchors and implicit spatial memory, the model preserves global scene geometry while maintaining fine-grained visual details across viewpoint changes. We further introduce a progressive three-stage training pipeline that transforms a pretrained image diffusion model into a controllable frame model and finally into a real-time generator through few-step distillation. Experimental results show that InSpatio-WorldFM achieves strong multi-view consistency while supporting interactive exploration on consumer-grade GPUs, providing an efficient alternative to traditional video-based world models for real-time world simulation.

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.

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.

World models have emerged as a critical frontier in AI research, aiming to enhance large models by infusing them with physical dynamics and world knowledge. The core objective is to enable agents to understand, predict, and interact with complex environments. However, current research landscape remains fragmented, with approaches predominantly focused on injecting world knowledge into isolated tasks, such as visual prediction, 3D estimation, or symbol grounding, rather than establishing a unified definition or framework. While these task-specific integrations yield performance gains, they often lack the systematic coherence required for holistic world understanding. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of such fragmented approaches and propose a unified design specification for world models. We suggest that a robust world model should not be a loose collection of capabilities but a normative framework that integrally incorporates interaction, perception, symbolic reasoning, and spatial representation. This work aims to provide a structured perspective to guide future research toward more general, robust, and principled models of the world.

Emerging world models autoregressively generate video frames in response to actions, such as camera movements and text prompts, among other control signals. Due to limited temporal context window sizes, these models often struggle to maintain scene consistency during revisits, leading to severe forgetting of previously generated environments. Inspired by the mechanisms of human memory, we introduce a novel framework to enhancing long-term consistency of video world models through a geometry-grounded long-term spatial memory. Our framework includes mechanisms to store and retrieve information from the long-term spatial memory and we curate custom datasets to train and evaluate world models with explicitly stored 3D memory mechanisms. Our evaluations show improved quality, consistency, and context length compared to relevant baselines, paving the way towards long-term consistent world generation.

World models that forecast scene evolution by generating future video frames devote the bulk of their capacity to photometric details, yet the resulting predictions often remain geometrically inconsistent. We present VGGT-World, a geometry world model that side-steps video generation entirely and instead forecasts the temporal evolution of frozen geometry-foundation-model (GFM) features. Concretely, we repurpose the latent tokens of a frozen VGGT as the world state and train a lightweight temporal flow transformer to autoregressively predict their future trajectory. Two technical challenges arise in this high-dimensional (d=1024) feature space: (i) standard velocity-prediction flow matching collapses, and (ii) autoregressive rollout suffers from compounding exposure bias. We address the first with a clean-target (z-prediction) parameterization that yields a substantially higher signal-to-noise ratio, and the second with a two-stage latent flow-forcing curriculum that progressively conditions the model on its own partially denoised rollouts. Experiments on KITTI, Cityscapes, and TartanAir demonstrate that VGGT-World significantly outperforms the strongest baselines in depth forecasting while running 3.6-5 times faster with only 0.43B trainable parameters, establishing frozen GFM features as an effective and efficient predictive state for 3D world modeling.

Predictive world models that simulate future observations under explicit camera control are fundamental to interactive AI. Despite rapid advances, current systems lack spatial persistence: they fail to maintain stable scene structures over long trajectories, frequently hallucinating details when cameras revisit previously observed locations. We identify that this geometric drift stems from reliance on screen-space positional embeddings, which conflict with the projective geometry required for 3D consistency. We introduce ViewRope, a geometry-aware encoding that injects camera-ray directions directly into video transformer self-attention layers. By parameterizing attention with relative ray geometry rather than pixel locality, ViewRope provides a model-native inductive bias for retrieving 3D-consistent content across temporal gaps. We further propose Geometry-Aware Frame-Sparse Attention, which exploits these geometric cues to selectively attend to relevant historical frames, improving efficiency without sacrificing memory consistency. We also present ViewBench, a diagnostic suite measuring loop-closure fidelity and geometric drift. Our results demonstrate that ViewRope substantially improves long-term consistency while reducing computational costs.

Incorporating spatial information, particularly those influenced by climate, weather, and demographic factors, is crucial for improving underwriting precision and enhancing risk management in insurance. However, spatial data are often unstructured, high-dimensional, and difficult to integrate into predictive models. Embedding methods are needed to convert spatial data into meaningful representations for modelling tasks. We propose a novel multi-view contrastive learning framework for generating spatial embeddings that combine information from multiple spatial data sources. To train the model, we construct a spatial dataset that merges satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap features across Europe. The framework aligns these spatial views with coordinate-based encodings, producing low-dimensional embeddings that capture both spatial structure and contextual similarity. Once trained, the model generates embeddings directly from latitude-longitude pairs, enabling any dataset with coordinates to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without requiring access to the original spatial inputs. In a case study on French real estate prices, we compare models trained on raw coordinates against those using our spatial embeddings as inputs. The embeddings consistently improve predictive accuracy across generalised linear, additive, and boosting models, while providing interpretable spatial effects and demonstrating transferability to unseen regions.

Generating long-range, geometrically consistent video presents a fundamental dilemma: while consistency demands strict adherence to 3D geometry in pixel space, state-of-the-art generative models operate most effectively in a camera-conditioned latent space. This disconnect causes current methods to struggle with occluded areas and complex camera trajectories. To bridge this gap, we propose WorldWarp, a framework that couples a 3D structural anchor with a 2D generative refiner. To establish geometric grounding, WorldWarp maintains an online 3D geometric cache built via Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By explicitly warping historical content into novel views, this cache acts as a structural scaffold, ensuring each new frame respects prior geometry. However, static warping inevitably leaves holes and artifacts due to occlusions. We address this using a Spatio-Temporal Diffusion (ST-Diff) model designed for a "fill-and-revise" objective. Our key innovation is a spatio-temporal varying noise schedule: blank regions receive full noise to trigger generation, while warped regions receive partial noise to enable refinement. By dynamically updating the 3D cache at every step, WorldWarp maintains consistency across video chunks. Consequently, it achieves state-of-the-art fidelity by ensuring that 3D logic guides structure while diffusion logic perfects texture. Project page: https://hyokong.github.io/worldwarp-page/{https://hyokong.github.io/worldwarp-page/}.

Generative world models are reshaping embodied AI, enabling agents to synthesize realistic 4D driving environments that look convincing but often fail physically or behaviorally. Despite rapid progress, the field still lacks a unified way to assess whether generated worlds preserve geometry, obey physics, or support reliable control. We introduce WorldLens, a full-spectrum benchmark evaluating how well a model builds, understands, and behaves within its generated world. It spans five aspects -- Generation, Reconstruction, Action-Following, Downstream Task, and Human Preference -- jointly covering visual realism, geometric consistency, physical plausibility, and functional reliability. Across these dimensions, no existing world model excels universally: those with strong textures often violate physics, while geometry-stable ones lack behavioral fidelity. To align objective metrics with human judgment, we further construct WorldLens-26K, a large-scale dataset of human-annotated videos with numerical scores and textual rationales, and develop WorldLens-Agent, an evaluation model distilled from these annotations to enable scalable, explainable scoring. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for measuring world fidelity -- standardizing how future models are judged not only by how real they look, but by how real they behave.

Recently, methods leveraging diffusion model priors to assist monocular geometric estimation (e.g., depth and normal) have gained significant attention due to their strong generalization ability. However, most existing works focus on estimating geometric properties within the camera coordinate system of individual video frames, neglecting the inherent ability of diffusion models to determine inter-frame correspondence. In this work, we demonstrate that, through appropriate design and fine-tuning, the intrinsic consistency of video generation models can be effectively harnessed for consistent geometric estimation. Specifically, we 1) select geometric attributes in the global coordinate system that share the same correspondence with video frames as the prediction targets, 2) introduce a novel and efficient conditioning method by reusing positional encodings, and 3) enhance performance through joint training on multiple geometric attributes that share the same correspondence. Our results achieve superior performance in predicting global geometric attributes in videos and can be directly applied to reconstruction tasks. Even when trained solely on static video data, our approach exhibits the potential to generalize to dynamic video scenes.

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.

We present WorldMirror, an all-in-one, feed-forward model for versatile 3D geometric prediction tasks. Unlike existing methods constrained to image-only inputs or customized for a specific task, our framework flexibly integrates diverse geometric priors, including camera poses, intrinsics, and depth maps, while simultaneously generating multiple 3D representations: dense point clouds, multi-view depth maps, camera parameters, surface normals, and 3D Gaussians. This elegant and unified architecture leverages available prior information to resolve structural ambiguities and delivers geometrically consistent 3D outputs in a single forward pass. WorldMirror achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks from camera, point map, depth, and surface normal estimation to novel view synthesis, while maintaining the efficiency of feed-forward inference. Code and models will be publicly available soon.

The concept of world models has garnered significant attention due to advancements in multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 and video generation models such as Sora, which are central to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the literature on world models. Generally, world models are regarded as tools for either understanding the present state of the world or predicting its future dynamics. This review presents a systematic categorization of world models, emphasizing two primary functions: (1) constructing internal representations to understand the mechanisms of the world, and (2) predicting future states to simulate and guide decision-making. Initially, we examine the current progress in these two categories. We then explore the application of world models in key domains, including generative games, autonomous driving, robotics, and social simulacra, with a focus on how each domain utilizes these aspects. Finally, we outline key challenges and provide insights into potential future research directions. We summarize the representative papers along with their code repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/World-Model.

World simulation has gained increasing popularity due to its ability to model virtual environments and predict the consequences of actions. However, the limited temporal context window often leads to failures in maintaining long-term consistency, particularly in preserving 3D spatial consistency. In this work, we present WorldMem, a framework that enhances scene generation with a memory bank consisting of memory units that store memory frames and states (e.g., poses and timestamps). By employing a memory attention mechanism that effectively extracts relevant information from these memory frames based on their states, our method is capable of accurately reconstructing previously observed scenes, even under significant viewpoint or temporal gaps. Furthermore, by incorporating timestamps into the states, our framework not only models a static world but also captures its dynamic evolution over time, enabling both perception and interaction within the simulated world. Extensive experiments in both virtual and real scenarios validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth's surface, remains an open challenge. We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture. First, we introduce Aerial-Earth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m x 600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames. Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity. Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation: 1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation. The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D. Our project page is available at https://whiteinblue.github.io/earthcrafter/

We present WorldCanvas, a framework for promptable world events that enables rich, user-directed simulation by combining text, trajectories, and reference images. Unlike text-only approaches and existing trajectory-controlled image-to-video methods, our multimodal approach combines trajectories -- encoding motion, timing, and visibility -- with natural language for semantic intent and reference images for visual grounding of object identity, enabling the generation of coherent, controllable events that include multi-agent interactions, object entry/exit, reference-guided appearance and counterintuitive events. The resulting videos demonstrate not only temporal coherence but also emergent consistency, preserving object identity and scene despite temporary disappearance. By supporting expressive world events generation, WorldCanvas advances world models from passive predictors to interactive, user-shaped simulators. Our project page is available at: https://worldcanvas.github.io/.

Recent video generators achieve striking photorealism, yet remain fundamentally inconsistent in 3D. We present WorldReel, a 4D video generator that is natively spatio-temporally consistent. WorldReel jointly produces RGB frames together with 4D scene representations, including pointmaps, camera trajectory, and dense flow mapping, enabling coherent geometry and appearance modeling over time. Our explicit 4D representation enforces a single underlying scene that persists across viewpoints and dynamic content, yielding videos that remain consistent even under large non-rigid motion and significant camera movement. We train WorldReel by carefully combining synthetic and real data: synthetic data providing precise 4D supervision (geometry, motion, and camera), while real videos contribute visual diversity and realism. This blend allows WorldReel to generalize to in-the-wild footage while preserving strong geometric fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WorldReel sets a new state-of-the-art for consistent video generation with dynamic scenes and moving cameras, improving metrics of geometric consistency, motion coherence, and reducing view-time artifacts over competing methods. We believe that WorldReel brings video generation closer to 4D-consistent world modeling, where agents can render, interact, and reason about scenes through a single and stable spatiotemporal representation.

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

World models aim to simulate environments and enable effective agent behavior. However, modeling real-world environments presents unique challenges as they dynamically change across both space and, crucially, time. To capture these composed dynamics, we introduce a Spatio-Temporal Road Image Dataset for Exploration (STRIDE) permuting 360-degree panoramic imagery into rich interconnected observation, state and action nodes. Leveraging this structure, we can simultaneously model the relationship between egocentric views, positional coordinates, and movement commands across both space and time. We benchmark this dataset via TARDIS, a transformer-based generative world model that integrates spatial and temporal dynamics through a unified autoregressive framework trained on STRIDE. We demonstrate robust performance across a range of agentic tasks such as controllable photorealistic image synthesis, instruction following, autonomous self-control, and state-of-the-art georeferencing. These results suggest a promising direction towards sophisticated generalist agents--capable of understanding and manipulating the spatial and temporal aspects of their material environments--with enhanced embodied reasoning capabilities. Training code, datasets, and model checkpoints are made available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Tera-AI/STRIDE.

World models serve as essential building blocks toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), enabling intelligent agents to predict future states and plan actions by simulating complex physical interactions. However, existing interactive models primarily predict visual observations, thereby neglecting crucial hidden states like geometric structures and spatial coherence. This leads to rapid error accumulation and temporal inconsistency. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepVerse, a novel 4D interactive world model explicitly incorporating geometric predictions from previous timesteps into current predictions conditioned on actions. Experiments demonstrate that by incorporating explicit geometric constraints, DeepVerse captures richer spatio-temporal relationships and underlying physical dynamics. This capability significantly reduces drift and enhances temporal consistency, enabling the model to reliably generate extended future sequences and achieve substantial improvements in prediction accuracy, visual realism, and scene rationality. Furthermore, our method provides an effective solution for geometry-aware memory retrieval, effectively preserving long-term spatial consistency. We validate the effectiveness of DeepVerse across diverse scenarios, establishing its capacity for high-fidelity, long-horizon predictions grounded in geometry-aware dynamics.

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Wrist-view observations are crucial for VLA models as they capture fine-grained hand-object interactions that directly enhance manipulation performance. Yet large-scale datasets rarely include such recordings, resulting in a substantial gap between abundant anchor views and scarce wrist views. Existing world models cannot bridge this gap, as they require a wrist-view first frame and thus fail to generate wrist-view videos from anchor views alone. Amid this gap, recent visual geometry models such as VGGT emerge with geometric and cross-view priors that make it possible to address extreme viewpoint shifts. Inspired by these insights, we propose WristWorld, the first 4D world model that generates wrist-view videos solely from anchor views. WristWorld operates in two stages: (i) Reconstruction, which extends VGGT and incorporates our Spatial Projection Consistency (SPC) Loss to estimate geometrically consistent wrist-view poses and 4D point clouds; (ii) Generation, which employs our video generation model to synthesize temporally coherent wrist-view videos from the reconstructed perspective. Experiments on Droid, Calvin, and Franka Panda demonstrate state-of-the-art video generation with superior spatial consistency, while also improving VLA performance, raising the average task completion length on Calvin by 3.81% and closing 42.4% of the anchor-wrist view gap.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding is commonly framed as a coordinate prediction task -- given a natural language instruction, generate on-screen coordinates for actions such as clicks and keystrokes. However, recent Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fail to predict accurate numeric coordinates when processing high-resolution GUI images with complex layouts. To address this issue, we reframe GUI grounding as an interactive search task, where the VLM generates actions to move a cursor in the GUI to locate UI elements. At each step, the model determines the target object, evaluates the spatial relations between the cursor and the target, and moves the cursor closer to the target conditioned on the movement history. In this interactive process, the rendered cursor provides visual feedback to help the model align its predictions with the corresponding on-screen locations. We train our GUI grounding model, GUI-Cursor, using multi-step online reinforcement learning with a dense trajectory-based reward function. Our experimental results show that GUI-Cursor, based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, improves the GUI grounding accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art results on ScreenSpot-v2 (88.8% rightarrow 93.9%) and ScreenSpot-Pro (26.8% rightarrow 56.5%). Moreover, we observe that GUI-Cursor learns to solve the problem within two steps for 95\% of instances and can adaptively conduct more steps on more difficult examples.

This paper presents WorldPlay, a streaming video diffusion model that enables real-time, interactive world modeling with long-term geometric consistency, resolving the trade-off between speed and memory that limits current methods. WorldPlay draws power from three key innovations. 1) We use a Dual Action Representation to enable robust action control in response to the user's keyboard and mouse inputs. 2) To enforce long-term consistency, our Reconstituted Context Memory dynamically rebuilds context from past frames and uses temporal reframing to keep geometrically important but long-past frames accessible, effectively alleviating memory attenuation. 3) We also propose Context Forcing, a novel distillation method designed for memory-aware model. Aligning memory context between the teacher and student preserves the student's capacity to use long-range information, enabling real-time speeds while preventing error drift. Taken together, WorldPlay generates long-horizon streaming 720p video at 24 FPS with superior consistency, comparing favorably with existing techniques and showing strong generalization across diverse scenes. Project page and online demo can be found: https://3d-models.hunyuan.tencent.com/world/ and https://3d.hunyuan.tencent.com/sceneTo3D.

We introduce PhysWorld, a framework that enables robot learning from video generation through physical world modeling. Recent video generation models can synthesize photorealistic visual demonstrations from language commands and images, offering a powerful yet underexplored source of training signals for robotics. However, directly retargeting pixel motions from generated videos to robots neglects physics, often resulting in inaccurate manipulations. PhysWorld addresses this limitation by coupling video generation with physical world reconstruction. Given a single image and a task command, our method generates task-conditioned videos and reconstructs the underlying physical world from the videos, and the generated video motions are grounded into physically accurate actions through object-centric residual reinforcement learning with the physical world model. This synergy transforms implicit visual guidance into physically executable robotic trajectories, eliminating the need for real robot data collection and enabling zero-shot generalizable robotic manipulation. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks demonstrate that PhysWorld substantially improves manipulation accuracy compared to previous approaches. Visit https://pointscoder.github.io/PhysWorld_Web/{the project webpage} for details.

Learning-based visual localization methods that use scene coordinate regression (SCR) offer the advantage of smaller map sizes. However, on datasets with complex illumination changes or image-level ambiguities, it remains a less robust alternative to feature matching methods. This work aims to close the gap. We introduce a covisibility graph-based global encoding learning and data augmentation strategy, along with a depth-adjusted reprojection loss to facilitate implicit triangulation. Additionally, we revisit the network architecture and local feature extraction module. Our method achieves state-of-the-art on challenging large-scale datasets without relying on network ensembles or 3D supervision. On Aachen Day-Night, we are 10times more accurate than previous SCR methods with similar map sizes and require at least 5times smaller map sizes than any other SCR method while still delivering superior accuracy. Code will be available at: https://github.com/cvg/scrstudio .

World models have garnered significant attention as a promising research direction in artificial intelligence, yet a clear and unified definition remains lacking. In this paper, we introduce OpenWorldLib, a comprehensive and standardized inference framework for Advanced World Models. Drawing on the evolution of world models, we propose a clear definition: a world model is a model or framework centered on perception, equipped with interaction and long-term memory capabilities, for understanding and predicting the complex world. We further systematically categorize the essential capabilities of world models. Based on this definition, OpenWorldLib integrates models across different tasks within a unified framework, enabling efficient reuse and collaborative inference. Finally, we present additional reflections and analyses on potential future directions for world model research. Code link: https://github.com/OpenDCAI/OpenWorldLib

The construction of World Models capable of learning, simulating, and reasoning about objective physical laws constitutes a foundational challenge in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence. Recent advancements represented by video generation models like Sora have demonstrated the potential of data-driven scaling laws to approximate physical dynamics, while the emerging Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) offers a promising architectural paradigm for integrating perception, language, and reasoning. Despite these advances, the field still lacks a principled theoretical framework that defines the essential properties requisite for a General World Model. In this paper, we propose that a World Model must be grounded in the Trinity of Consistency: Modal Consistency as the semantic interface, Spatial Consistency as the geometric basis, and Temporal Consistency as the causal engine. Through this tripartite lens, we systematically review the evolution of multimodal learning, revealing a trajectory from loosely coupled specialized modules toward unified architectures that enable the synergistic emergence of internal world simulators. To complement this conceptual framework, we introduce CoW-Bench, a benchmark centered on multi-frame reasoning and generation scenarios. CoW-Bench evaluates both video generation models and UMMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our work establishes a principled pathway toward general world models, clarifying both the limitations of current systems and the architectural requirements for future progress.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved photorealistic novel views synthesis; however, the requirement of accurate camera poses limits its application. Despite analysis-by-synthesis extensions for jointly learning neural 3D representations and registering camera frames exist, they are susceptible to suboptimal solutions if poorly initialized. We propose L2G-NeRF, a Local-to-Global registration method for bundle-adjusting Neural Radiance Fields: first, a pixel-wise flexible alignment, followed by a frame-wise constrained parametric alignment. Pixel-wise local alignment is learned in an unsupervised way via a deep network which optimizes photometric reconstruction errors. Frame-wise global alignment is performed using differentiable parameter estimation solvers on the pixel-wise correspondences to find a global transformation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of high-fidelity reconstruction and resolving large camera pose misalignment. Our module is an easy-to-use plugin that can be applied to NeRF variants and other neural field applications. The Code and supplementary materials are available at https://rover-xingyu.github.io/L2G-NeRF/.

Creating immersive and playable 3D worlds from texts or images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Existing world generation approaches typically fall into two categories: video-based methods that offer rich diversity but lack 3D consistency and rendering efficiency, and 3D-based methods that provide geometric consistency but struggle with limited training data and memory-inefficient representations. To address these limitations, we present HunyuanWorld 1.0, a novel framework that combines the best of both worlds for generating immersive, explorable, and interactive 3D scenes from text and image conditions. Our approach features three key advantages: 1) 360{\deg} immersive experiences via panoramic world proxies; 2) mesh export capabilities for seamless compatibility with existing computer graphics pipelines; 3) disentangled object representations for augmented interactivity. The core of our framework is a semantically layered 3D mesh representation that leverages panoramic images as 360{\deg} world proxies for semantic-aware world decomposition and reconstruction, enabling the generation of diverse 3D worlds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating coherent, explorable, and interactive 3D worlds while enabling versatile applications in virtual reality, physical simulation, game development, and interactive content creation.

Foundational world models must be both interactive and preserve spatiotemporal coherence for effective future planning with action choices. However, present models for long video generation have limited inherent world modeling capabilities due to two main challenges: compounding errors and insufficient memory mechanisms. We enhance image-to-video models with interactive capabilities through additional action conditioning and autoregressive framework, and reveal that compounding error is inherently irreducible in autoregressive video generation, while insufficient memory mechanism leads to incoherence of world models. We propose video retrieval augmented generation (VRAG) with explicit global state conditioning, which significantly reduces long-term compounding errors and increases spatiotemporal consistency of world models. In contrast, naive autoregressive generation with extended context windows and retrieval-augmented generation prove less effective for video generation, primarily due to the limited in-context learning capabilities of current video models. Our work illuminates the fundamental challenges in video world models and establishes a comprehensive benchmark for improving video generation models with internal world modeling capabilities.

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIP

Recent advances in video world modeling have enabled large-scale generative models to simulate embodied environments with high visual fidelity, providing strong priors for prediction, planning, and control. Yet, despite their realism, these models often lack geometric grounding, limiting their use in navigation tasks that require spatial coherence and long-horizon stability. We introduce Reinforcement Learning with World Grounding (RLWG), a self-supervised post-training framework that aligns pretrained world models with a physically verifiable structure through geometric and perceptual rewards. Analogous to reinforcement learning from verifiable feedback (RLVR) in language models, RLWG can use multiple rewards that measure pose cycle-consistency, depth reprojection, and temporal coherence. We instantiate this framework with GrndCtrl, a reward-aligned adaptation method based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), yielding world models that maintain stable trajectories, consistent geometry, and reliable rollouts for embodied navigation. Like post-training alignment in large language models, GrndCtrl leverages verifiable rewards to bridge generative pretraining and grounded behavior, achieving superior spatial coherence and navigation stability over supervised fine-tuning in outdoor environments.

We present Spann3R, a novel approach for dense 3D reconstruction from ordered or unordered image collections. Built on the DUSt3R paradigm, Spann3R uses a transformer-based architecture to directly regress pointmaps from images without any prior knowledge of the scene or camera parameters. Unlike DUSt3R, which predicts per image-pair pointmaps each expressed in its local coordinate frame, Spann3R can predict per-image pointmaps expressed in a global coordinate system, thus eliminating the need for optimization-based global alignment. The key idea of Spann3R is to manage an external spatial memory that learns to keep track of all previous relevant 3D information. Spann3R then queries this spatial memory to predict the 3D structure of the next frame in a global coordinate system. Taking advantage of DUSt3R's pre-trained weights, and further fine-tuning on a subset of datasets, Spann3R shows competitive performance and generalization ability on various unseen datasets and can process ordered image collections in real time. Project page: https://hengyiwang.github.io/projects/spanner

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

Planning with world models offers a powerful paradigm for robotic control. Conventional approaches train a model to predict future frames conditioned on current frames and actions, which can then be used for planning. However, the objective of predicting future pixels is often at odds with the actual planning objective; strong pixel reconstruction does not always correlate with good planning decisions. This paper posits that instead of reconstructing future frames as pixels, world models only need to predict task-relevant semantic information about the future. For such prediction the paper poses world modeling as a visual question answering problem about semantic information in future frames. This perspective allows world modeling to be approached with the same tools underlying vision language models. Thus vision language models can be trained as "semantic" world models through a supervised finetuning process on image-action-text data, enabling planning for decision-making while inheriting many of the generalization and robustness properties from the pretrained vision-language models. The paper demonstrates how such a semantic world model can be used for policy improvement on open-ended robotics tasks, leading to significant generalization improvements over typical paradigms of reconstruction-based action-conditional world modeling. Website available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/swm.

The field of 4D world modeling - aiming to jointly capture spatial geometry and temporal dynamics - has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in large-scale generative models and multimodal learning. However, the development of truly general 4D world models remains fundamentally constrained by the availability of high-quality data. Existing datasets and benchmarks often lack the dynamic complexity, multi-domain diversity, and spatial-temporal annotations required to support key tasks such as 4D geometric reconstruction, future prediction, and camera-control video generation. To address this gap, we introduce OmniWorld, a large-scale, multi-domain, multi-modal dataset specifically designed for 4D world modeling. OmniWorld consists of a newly collected OmniWorld-Game dataset and several curated public datasets spanning diverse domains. Compared with existing synthetic datasets, OmniWorld-Game provides richer modality coverage, larger scale, and more realistic dynamic interactions. Based on this dataset, we establish a challenging benchmark that exposes the limitations of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in modeling complex 4D environments. Moreover, fine-tuning existing SOTA methods on OmniWorld leads to significant performance gains across 4D reconstruction and video generation tasks, strongly validating OmniWorld as a powerful resource for training and evaluation. We envision OmniWorld as a catalyst for accelerating the development of general-purpose 4D world models, ultimately advancing machines' holistic understanding of the physical world.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications that interact with the physical world, such as navigation, robotics, or mapping, making robust geospatial reasoning a critical capability. Despite that, LLMs' ability to reason about GPS coordinates and real-world geography remains underexplored. We introduce GPSBench, a dataset of 57,800 samples across 17 tasks for evaluating geospatial reasoning in LLMs, spanning geometric coordinate operations (e.g., distance and bearing computation) and reasoning that integrates coordinates with world knowledge. Focusing on intrinsic model capabilities rather than tool use, we evaluate 14 state-of-the-art LLMs and find that GPS reasoning remains challenging, with substantial variation across tasks: models are generally more reliable at real-world geographic reasoning than at geometric computations. Geographic knowledge degrades hierarchically, with strong country-level performance but weak city-level localization, while robustness to coordinate noise suggests genuine coordinate understanding rather than memorization. We further show that GPS-coordinate augmentation can improve in downstream geospatial tasks, and that finetuning induces trade-offs between gains in geometric computation and degradation in world knowledge. Our dataset and reproducible code are available at https://github.com/joey234/gpsbench

Novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views given a set of calibrated images. In practical applications, the coverage, appearance or geometry of the scene may change over time, with new images continuously being captured. Efficiently incorporating such continuous change is an open challenge. Standard NeRF benchmarks only involve scene coverage expansion. To study other practical scene changes, we propose a new dataset, World Across Time (WAT), consisting of scenes that change in appearance and geometry over time. We also propose a simple yet effective method, CLNeRF, which introduces continual learning (CL) to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). CLNeRF combines generative replay and the Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (NGP) architecture to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting and efficiently update the model when new data arrives. We also add trainable appearance and geometry embeddings to NGP, allowing a single compact model to handle complex scene changes. Without the need to store historical images, CLNeRF trained sequentially over multiple scans of a changing scene performs on-par with the upper bound model trained on all scans at once. Compared to other CL baselines CLNeRF performs much better across standard benchmarks and WAT. The source code, and the WAT dataset are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/CLNeRF. Video presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/nLRt6OoDGq0?si=8yD6k-8MMBJInQPs

Scene coordinate regression (SCR) methods are a family of visual localization methods that directly regress 2D-3D matches for camera pose estimation. They are effective in small-scale scenes but face significant challenges in large-scale scenes that are further amplified in the absence of ground truth 3D point clouds for supervision. Here, the model can only rely on reprojection constraints and needs to implicitly triangulate the points. The challenges stem from a fundamental dilemma: The network has to be invariant to observations of the same landmark at different viewpoints and lighting conditions, etc., but at the same time discriminate unrelated but similar observations. The latter becomes more relevant and severe in larger scenes. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing the concept of co-visibility to the network. We propose GLACE, which integrates pre-trained global and local encodings and enables SCR to scale to large scenes with only a single small-sized network. Specifically, we propose a novel feature diffusion technique that implicitly groups the reprojection constraints with co-visibility and avoids overfitting to trivial solutions. Additionally, our position decoder parameterizes the output positions for large-scale scenes more effectively. Without using 3D models or depth maps for supervision, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale scenes with a low-map-size model. On Cambridge landmarks, with a single model, we achieve 17% lower median position error than Poker, the ensemble variant of the state-of-the-art SCR method ACE. Code is available at: https://github.com/cvg/glace.

A world model is essential for an agent to predict the future and plan in domains such as autonomous driving and robotics. To achieve this, recent advancements have focused on video generation, which has gained significant attention due to the impressive success of diffusion models. However, these models require substantial computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a world model leveraging object-centric representation space using slot attention, guided by language instructions. Our model perceives the current state as an object-centric representation and predicts future states in this representation space conditioned on natural language instructions. This approach results in a more compact and computationally efficient model compared to diffusion-based generative alternatives. Furthermore, it flexibly predicts future states based on language instructions, and offers a significant advantage in manipulation tasks where object recognition is crucial. In this paper, we demonstrate that our latent predictive world model surpasses generative world models in visuo-linguo-motor control tasks, achieving superior sample and computation efficiency. We also investigate the generalization performance of the proposed method and explore various strategies for predicting actions using object-centric representations.

Remote sensing world models aim to both explain observed changes and forecast plausible futures, two tasks that share spatiotemporal priors. Existing methods, however, typically address them separately, limiting cross-task transfer. We present RS-WorldModel, a unified world model for remote sensing that jointly handles spatiotemporal change understanding and text-guided future scene forecasting, and we build RSWBench-1.1M, a 1.1 million sample dataset with rich language annotations covering both tasks. RS-WorldModel is trained in three stages: (1) Geo-Aware Generative Pre-training (GAGP) conditions forecasting on geographic and acquisition metadata; (2) synergistic instruction tuning (SIT) jointly trains understanding and forecasting; (3) verifiable reinforcement optimization (VRO) refines outputs with verifiable, task-specific rewards. With only 2B parameters, RS-WorldModel surpasses open-source models up to 120 times larger on most spatiotemporal change question-answering metrics. It achieves an FID of 43.13 on text-guided future scene forecasting, outperforming all open-source baselines as well as the closed-source Gemini-2.5-Flash Image (Nano Banana).

Learning feature representations of geographical space is vital for any machine learning model that integrates geolocated data, spanning application domains such as remote sensing, ecology, or epidemiology. Recent work mostly embeds coordinates using sine and cosine projections based on Double Fourier Sphere (DFS) features -- these embeddings assume a rectangular data domain even on global data, which can lead to artifacts, especially at the poles. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the exact design of the neural network architectures these functional embeddings are combined with. This work proposes a novel location encoder for globally distributed geographic data that combines spherical harmonic basis functions, natively defined on spherical surfaces, with sinusoidal representation networks (SirenNets) that can be interpreted as learned Double Fourier Sphere embedding. We systematically evaluate the cross-product of positional embeddings and neural network architectures across various classification and regression benchmarks and synthetic evaluation datasets. In contrast to previous approaches that require the combination of both positional encoding and neural networks to learn meaningful representations, we show that both spherical harmonics and sinusoidal representation networks are competitive on their own but set state-of-the-art performances across tasks when combined. We provide source code at www.github.com/marccoru/locationencoder

GUI grounding, the task of mapping natural-language instructions to pixel coordinates, is crucial for autonomous agents, yet remains difficult for current VLMs. The core bottleneck is reliable patch-to-pixel mapping, which breaks when extrapolating to high-resolution displays unseen during training. Current approaches generate coordinates as text tokens directly from visual features, forcing the model to infer complex position-to-pixel mappings implicitly; as a result, accuracy degrades and failures proliferate on new resolutions. We address this with two complementary innovations. First, RULER tokens serve as explicit coordinate markers, letting the model reference positions similar to gridlines on a map and adjust rather than generate coordinates from scratch. Second, Interleaved MRoPE (I-MRoPE) improves spatial encoding by ensuring that width and height dimensions are represented equally, addressing the asymmetry of standard positional schemes. Experiments on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-V2, and ScreenSpot-Pro show consistent gains in grounding accuracy, with the largest improvements on high-resolution interfaces. By providing explicit spatial guidance rather than relying on implicit learning, our approach enables more reliable GUI automation across diverse resolutions and platforms.

Synthesizing controllable 6-DOF object manipulation trajectories in 3D environments is essential for enabling robots to interact with complex scenes, yet remains challenging due to the need for accurate spatial reasoning, physical feasibility, and multimodal scene understanding. Existing approaches often rely on 2D or partial 3D representations, limiting their ability to capture full scene geometry and constraining trajectory precision. We present GMT, a multimodal transformer framework that generates realistic and goal-directed object trajectories by jointly leveraging 3D bounding box geometry, point cloud context, semantic object categories, and target end poses. The model represents trajectories as continuous 6-DOF pose sequences and employs a tailored conditioning strategy that fuses geometric, semantic, contextual, and goaloriented information. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GMT outperforms state-of-the-art human motion and human-object interaction baselines, such as CHOIS and GIMO, achieving substantial gains in spatial accuracy and orientation control. Our method establishes a new benchmark for learningbased manipulation planning and shows strong generalization to diverse objects and cluttered 3D environments. Project page: https://huajian- zeng.github. io/projects/gmt/.

High-quality 3D world models are pivotal for embodied intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), underpinning applications such as AR/VR content creation and robotic navigation. Despite the established strong imaginative priors, current video foundation models lack explicit 3D grounding capabilities, thus being limited in both spatial consistency and their utility for downstream 3D reasoning tasks. In this work, we present FantasyWorld, a geometry-enhanced framework that augments frozen video foundation models with a trainable geometric branch, enabling joint modeling of video latents and an implicit 3D field in a single forward pass. Our approach introduces cross-branch supervision, where geometry cues guide video generation and video priors regularize 3D prediction, thus yielding consistent and generalizable 3D-aware video representations. Notably, the resulting latents from the geometric branch can potentially serve as versatile representations for downstream 3D tasks such as novel view synthesis and navigation, without requiring per-scene optimization or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that FantasyWorld effectively bridges video imagination and 3D perception, outperforming recent geometry-consistent baselines in multi-view coherence and style consistency. Ablation studies further confirm that these gains stem from the unified backbone and cross-branch information exchange.

Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/

Humans can develop internal world models that encode common sense knowledge, telling them how the world works and predicting the consequences of their actions. This concept has emerged as a promising direction for establishing general-purpose machine-learning models in recent preliminary works, e.g., for visual representation learning. In this paper, we present CheXWorld, the first effort towards a self-supervised world model for radiographic images. Specifically, our work develops a unified framework that simultaneously models three aspects of medical knowledge essential for qualified radiologists, including 1) local anatomical structures describing the fine-grained characteristics of local tissues (e.g., architectures, shapes, and textures); 2) global anatomical layouts describing the global organization of the human body (e.g., layouts of organs and skeletons); and 3) domain variations that encourage CheXWorld to model the transitions across different appearance domains of radiographs (e.g., varying clarity, contrast, and exposure caused by collecting radiographs from different hospitals, devices, or patients). Empirically, we design tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, revealing that CheXWorld successfully captures these three dimensions of medical knowledge. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments across eight medical image classification and segmentation benchmarks showcase that CheXWorld significantly outperforms existing SSL methods and large-scale medical foundation models. Code & pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/CheXWorld.

Humans construct internal world models and reason by manipulating the concepts within these models. Recent advances in AI, particularly chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, approximate such human cognitive abilities, where world models are believed to be embedded within large language models. Expert-level performance in formal and abstract domains such as mathematics and programming has been achieved in current systems by relying predominantly on verbal reasoning. However, they still lag far behind humans in domains like physical and spatial intelligence, which require richer representations and prior knowledge. The emergence of unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of both verbal and visual generation has therefore sparked interest in more human-like reasoning grounded in complementary multimodal pathways, though their benefits remain unclear. From a world-model perspective, this paper presents the first principled study of when and how visual generation benefits reasoning. Our key position is the visual superiority hypothesis: for certain tasks--particularly those grounded in the physical world--visual generation more naturally serves as world models, whereas purely verbal world models encounter bottlenecks arising from representational limitations or insufficient prior knowledge. Theoretically, we formalize internal world modeling as a core component of CoT reasoning and analyze distinctions among different forms of world models. Empirically, we identify tasks that necessitate interleaved visual-verbal CoT reasoning, constructing a new evaluation suite, VisWorld-Eval. Controlled experiments on a state-of-the-art UMM show that interleaved CoT significantly outperforms purely verbal CoT on tasks that favor visual world modeling, but offers no clear advantage otherwise. Together, this work clarifies the potential of multimodal world modeling for more powerful, human-like multimodal AI.

Recent advances in foundational Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) have yielded significant progress. Yet, despite the remarkable visual quality of generated videos, reconstructing consistent 3D scenes from these outputs remains challenging, due to limited camera controllability and inconsistent generated content when viewed from distinct camera trajectories. In this paper, we propose WorldStereo, a novel framework that bridges camera-guided video generation and 3D reconstruction via two dedicated geometric memory modules. Formally, the global-geometric memory enables precise camera control while injecting coarse structural priors through incrementally updated point clouds. Moreover, the spatial-stereo memory constrains the model's attention receptive fields with 3D correspondence to focus on fine-grained details from the memory bank. These components enable WorldStereo to generate multi-view-consistent videos under precise camera control, facilitating high-quality 3D reconstruction. Furthermore, the flexible control branch-based WorldStereo shows impressive efficiency, benefiting from the distribution matching distilled VDM backbone without joint training. Extensive experiments across both camera-guided video generation and 3D reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, we show that WorldStereo acts as a powerful world model, tackling diverse scene generation tasks (whether starting from perspective or panoramic images) with high-fidelity 3D results. Models will be released.

Video--based world models have emerged along two dominant paradigms: video generation and 3D reconstruction. However, existing evaluation benchmarks either focus narrowly on visual fidelity and text--video alignment for generative models, or rely on static 3D reconstruction metrics that fundamentally neglect temporal dynamics. We argue that the future of world modeling lies in 4D generation, which jointly models spatial structure and temporal evolution. In this paradigm, the core capability is interactive response: the ability to faithfully reflect how interaction actions drive state transitions across space and time. Yet no existing benchmark systematically evaluates this critical dimension. To address this gap, we propose Omni--WorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the interactive response capabilities of world models in 4D settings. Omni--WorldBench comprises two key components: Omni--WorldSuite, a systematic prompt suite spanning diverse interaction levels and scene types; and Omni--Metrics, an agent-based evaluation framework that quantifies world modeling capabilities by measuring the causal impact of interaction actions on both final outcomes and intermediate state evolution trajectories. We conduct extensive evaluations of 18 representative world models across multiple paradigms. Our analysis reveals critical limitations of current world models in interactive response, providing actionable insights for future research. Omni-WorldBench will be publicly released to foster progress in interactive 4D world modeling.

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce Workforce, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities. This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases: During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents; For training, we introduce Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL), which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks. Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance (69.70%), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by 2.34%. More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves 52.73% accuracy (+16.37%) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks. To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants.

Coordinate networks are widely used in computer vision due to their ability to represent signals as compressed, continuous entities. However, training these networks with first-order optimizers can be slow, hindering their use in real-time applications. Recent works have opted for shallow voxel-based representations to achieve faster training, but this sacrifices memory efficiency. This work proposes a solution that leverages second-order optimization methods to significantly reduce training times for coordinate networks while maintaining their compressibility. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on various signal modalities, such as audio, images, videos, shape reconstruction, and neural radiance fields.

Three-dimensional objects are commonly represented as 3D boxes in a point-cloud. This representation mimics the well-studied image-based 2D bounding-box detection but comes with additional challenges. Objects in a 3D world do not follow any particular orientation, and box-based detectors have difficulties enumerating all orientations or fitting an axis-aligned bounding box to rotated objects. In this paper, we instead propose to represent, detect, and track 3D objects as points. Our framework, CenterPoint, first detects centers of objects using a keypoint detector and regresses to other attributes, including 3D size, 3D orientation, and velocity. In a second stage, it refines these estimates using additional point features on the object. In CenterPoint, 3D object tracking simplifies to greedy closest-point matching. The resulting detection and tracking algorithm is simple, efficient, and effective. CenterPoint achieved state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark for both 3D detection and tracking, with 65.5 NDS and 63.8 AMOTA for a single model. On the Waymo Open Dataset, CenterPoint outperforms all previous single model method by a large margin and ranks first among all Lidar-only submissions. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tianweiy/CenterPoint.

Physical AI needs to be trained digitally first. It needs a digital twin of itself, the policy model, and a digital twin of the world, the world model. In this paper, we present the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to help developers build customized world models for their Physical AI setups. We position a world foundation model as a general-purpose world model that can be fine-tuned into customized world models for downstream applications. Our platform covers a video curation pipeline, pre-trained world foundation models, examples of post-training of pre-trained world foundation models, and video tokenizers. To help Physical AI builders solve the most critical problems of our society, we make our platform open-source and our models open-weight with permissive licenses available via https://github.com/NVIDIA/Cosmos.

Diffusion-based world models have shown strong potential for unified world simulation, but the iterative denoising remains too costly for interactive use and long-horizon rollouts. While feature caching can accelerate inference without training, we find that policies designed for single-modal diffusion transfer poorly to world models due to two world-model-specific obstacles: token heterogeneity from multi-modal coupling and spatial variation, and non-uniform temporal dynamics where a small set of hard tokens drives error growth, making uniform skipping either unstable or overly conservative. We propose WorldCache, a caching framework tailored to diffusion world models. We introduce Curvature-guided Heterogeneous Token Prediction, which uses a physics-grounded curvature score to estimate token predictability and applies a Hermite-guided damped predictor for chaotic tokens with abrupt direction changes. We also design Chaotic-prioritized Adaptive Skipping, which accumulates a curvature-normalized, dimensionless drift signal and recomputes only when bottleneck tokens begin to drift. Experiments on diffusion world models show that WorldCache delivers up to 3.7times end-to-end speedups while maintaining 98\% rollout quality, demonstrating the vast advantages and practicality of WorldCache in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/FofGofx/WorldCache.

We revisit the geometric theory of defects. In the differential-geometric models of defects that have been adopted since the 1950s, dislocations have been associated with torsion, disclinations with the full curvature, and point defects with the first kind trace of non-metricity. The mainstream formulation exhibits several conceptual and technical shortcomings, most notably a hierarchy inconsistency, the non-exictence of a genuine metric formulation, and the potential emergence of Ostrogradsky-type instabilities. These issues have motivated us to develop a new framework, namely a generalized teleparallel geometric theory of defects. In our model, dislocations are identified with the trace of torsion, disclinations with the second kind trace of the non-metricity, and point defects with the first kind trace of the non-metricity. In addition, we retain the scalar part torsion as a free parameter for describing some possible unknown degrees of freedom in the theory of defects. The proposed geometric theory of defects is free from all of the aforementioned drawbacks and is therefore worthy of further investigation. To ensure the coherence and completeness of the discussion, we begin our analysis with elastic deformations, then summarize the existing metric-affine geometric theory of defects, and finally proceed to our original contribution, namely the new theory introduced here. We formulate the entire theory in Eulerian coordinates. Naturally, all results can be reformulated in Lagrangian coordinates as well. All analyses and formulae are expressed in the language of exterior algebra and are carried out in coordinate-independent orthonormal frames.

World Generation Models are emerging as a cornerstone of next-generation multimodal intelligence systems. Unlike traditional 2D visual generation, World Models aim to construct realistic, dynamic, and physically consistent 3D/4D worlds from images, videos, or text. These models not only need to produce high-fidelity visual content but also maintain coherence across space, time, physics, and instruction control, enabling applications in virtual reality, autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and content creation. However, prior benchmarks emphasize different evaluation dimensions and lack a unified assessment of world-realism capability. To systematically evaluate World Models, we introduce the 4DWorldBench, which measures models across four key dimensions: Perceptual Quality, Condition-4D Alignment, Physical Realism, and 4D Consistency. The benchmark covers tasks such as Image-to-3D/4D, Video-to-4D, Text-to-3D/4D. Beyond these, we innovatively introduce adaptive conditioning across multiple modalities, which not only integrates but also extends traditional evaluation paradigms. To accommodate different modality-conditioned inputs, we map all modality conditions into a unified textual space during evaluation, and further integrate LLM-as-judge, MLLM-as-judge, and traditional network-based methods. This unified and adaptive design enables more comprehensive and consistent evaluation of alignment, physical realism, and cross-modal coherence. Preliminary human studies further demonstrate that our adaptive tool selection achieves closer agreement with subjective human judgments. We hope this benchmark will serve as a foundation for objective comparisons and improvements, accelerating the transition from "visual generation" to "world generation." Our project can be found at https://yeppp27.github.io/4DWorldBench.github.io/.

We tackle the challenge of generating the infinitely extendable 3D world -- large, continuous environments with coherent geometry and realistic appearance. Existing methods face key challenges: 2D-lifting approaches suffer from geometric and appearance inconsistencies across views, 3D implicit representations are hard to scale up, and current 3D foundation models are mostly object-centric, limiting their applicability to scene-level generation. Our key insight is leveraging strong generation priors from pre-trained 3D models for structured scene block generation. To this end, we propose WorldGrow, a hierarchical framework for unbounded 3D scene synthesis. Our method features three core components: (1) a data curation pipeline that extracts high-quality scene blocks for training, making the 3D structured latent representations suitable for scene generation; (2) a 3D block inpainting mechanism that enables context-aware scene extension; and (3) a coarse-to-fine generation strategy that ensures both global layout plausibility and local geometric/textural fidelity. Evaluated on the large-scale 3D-FRONT dataset, WorldGrow achieves SOTA performance in geometry reconstruction, while uniquely supporting infinite scene generation with photorealistic and structurally consistent outputs. These results highlight its capability for constructing large-scale virtual environments and potential for building future world models.

A world model provides an agent with a representation of its environment, enabling it to predict the causal consequences of its actions. Current world models typically cannot directly and explicitly imitate the actual environment in front of a robot, often resulting in unrealistic behaviors and hallucinations that make them unsuitable for real-world robotics applications. To overcome those challenges, we propose to rethink robot world models as learnable digital twins. We introduce DreMa, a new approach for constructing digital twins automatically using learned explicit representations of the real world and its dynamics, bridging the gap between traditional digital twins and world models. DreMa replicates the observed world and its structure by integrating Gaussian Splatting and physics simulators, allowing robots to imagine novel configurations of objects and to predict the future consequences of robot actions thanks to its compositionality. We leverage this capability to generate new data for imitation learning by applying equivariant transformations to a small set of demonstrations. Our evaluations across various settings demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness by incrementing actions and object distributions, reducing the data needed to learn a policy and improving the generalization of the agents. As a highlight, we show that a real Franka Emika Panda robot, powered by DreMa's imagination, can successfully learn novel physical tasks from just a single example per task variation (one-shot policy learning). Our project page can be found in: https://dreamtomanipulate.github.io/.

Recent advances in generative foundational models, often termed "world models," have propelled interest in applying them to critical tasks like robotic planning and autonomous system training. For reliable deployment, these models must exhibit high physical fidelity, accurately simulating real-world dynamics. Existing physics-based video benchmarks, however, suffer from entanglement, where a single test simultaneously evaluates multiple physical laws and concepts, fundamentally limiting their diagnostic capability. We introduce WorldBench, a novel video-based benchmark specifically designed for concept-specific, disentangled evaluation, allowing us to rigorously isolate and assess understanding of a single physical concept or law at a time. To make WorldBench comprehensive, we design benchmarks at two different levels: 1) an evaluation of intuitive physical understanding with concepts such as object permanence or scale/perspective, and 2) an evaluation of low-level physical constants and material properties such as friction coefficients or fluid viscosity. When SOTA video-based world models are evaluated on WorldBench, we find specific patterns of failure in particular physics concepts, with all tested models lacking the physical consistency required to generate reliable real-world interactions. Through its concept-specific evaluation, WorldBench offers a more nuanced and scalable framework for rigorously evaluating the physical reasoning capabilities of video generation and world models, paving the way for more robust and generalizable world-model-driven learning.

World models learn an internal representation of environment dynamics, enabling agents to simulate and reason about future states within a compact latent space for tasks such as planning, prediction, and inference. However, running world models rely on hevay computational cost and memory footprint, making model quantization essential for efficient deployment. To date, the effects of post-training quantization (PTQ) on world models remain largely unexamined. In this work, we present a systematic empirical study of world model quantization using DINO-WM as a representative case, evaluating diverse PTQ methods under both weight-only and joint weight-activation settings. We conduct extensive experiments on different visual planning tasks across a wide range of bit-widths, quantization granularities, and planning horizons up to 50 iterations. Our results show that quantization effects in world models extend beyond standard accuracy and bit-width trade-offs: group-wise weight quantization can stabilize low-bit rollouts, activation quantization granularity yields inconsistent benefits, and quantization sensitivity is highly asymmetric between encoder and predictor modules. Moreover, aggressive low-bit quantization significantly degrades the alignment between the planning objective and task success, leading to failures that cannot be remedied by additional optimization. These findings reveal distinct quantization-induced failure modes in world model-based planning and provide practical guidance for deploying quantized world models under strict computational constraints. The code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/QuantWM.

The landscape of video generation is shifting, from a focus on generating visually appealing clips to building virtual environments that support interaction and maintain physical plausibility. These developments point toward the emergence of video foundation models that function not only as visual generators but also as implicit world models, models that simulate the physical dynamics, agent-environment interactions, and task planning that govern real or imagined worlds. This survey provides a systematic overview of this evolution, conceptualizing modern video foundation models as the combination of two core components: an implicit world model and a video renderer. The world model encodes structured knowledge about the world, including physical laws, interaction dynamics, and agent behavior. It serves as a latent simulation engine that enables coherent visual reasoning, long-term temporal consistency, and goal-driven planning. The video renderer transforms this latent simulation into realistic visual observations, effectively producing videos as a "window" into the simulated world. We trace the progression of video generation through four generations, in which the core capabilities advance step by step, ultimately culminating in a world model, built upon a video generation model, that embodies intrinsic physical plausibility, real-time multimodal interaction, and planning capabilities spanning multiple spatiotemporal scales. For each generation, we define its core characteristics, highlight representative works, and examine their application domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, and interactive gaming. Finally, we discuss open challenges and design principles for next-generation world models, including the role of agent intelligence in shaping and evaluating these systems. An up-to-date list of related works is maintained at this link.

Model-learning agents should gather information to learn world models that support many downstream tasks and inferences, such as predicting unobserved states, estimating near- and far-term consequences of actions, planning action sequences, and detecting changes in dynamics. Current methods for learning and evaluating world models diverge from this goal: training and evaluation are anchored to next-frame prediction, and success is scored by reward maximization in the same environment. We propose WorldTest, a protocol to evaluate model-learning agents that separates reward-free interaction from a scored test phase in a different but related environment. WorldTest is open-endedx2014models should support many different tasks unknown ahead of timex2014and agnostic to model representation, allowing comparison across approaches. We instantiated WorldTest with AutumnBench, a suite of 43 interactive grid-world environments and 129 tasks across three families: masked-frame prediction, planning, and predicting changes to the causal dynamics. We compared 517 human participants and three frontier models on AutumnBench. We found that humans outperform the models, and scaling compute improves performance only in some environments but not others. WorldTest provides a novel templatex2014reward-free exploration, derived tests, and behavior-based scoringx2014to evaluate what agents learn about environment dynamics, and AutumnBench exposes significant headroom in world-model learning.

How does the brain predict physical outcomes while acting in the world? Machine learning world models compress visual input into latent spaces, discarding the spatial structure that characterizes sensory cortex. We propose isomorphic world models: architectures preserving sensory topology so that physics prediction becomes geometric propagation rather than abstract state transition. We implement this using neural fields with motor-gated channels, where activity evolves through local lateral connectivity and motor commands multiplicatively modulate specific populations. Three experiments support this approach: (1) local connectivity is sufficient to learn ballistic physics, with predictions traversing intermediate locations rather than "teleporting"; (2) policies trained entirely in imagination transfer to real physics at nearly twice the rate of latent-space alternatives; and (3) motor-gated channels spontaneously develop body-selective encoding through visuomotor prediction alone. These findings suggest intuitive physics and body schema may share a common origin in spatially structured neural dynamics.

Recent techniques for text-to-4D generation synthesize dynamic 3D scenes using supervision from pre-trained text-to-video models. However, existing representations for motion, such as deformation models or time-dependent neural representations, are limited in the amount of motion they can generate-they cannot synthesize motion extending far beyond the bounding box used for volume rendering. The lack of a more flexible motion model contributes to the gap in realism between 4D generation methods and recent, near-photorealistic video generation models. Here, we propose TC4D: trajectory-conditioned text-to-4D generation, which factors motion into global and local components. We represent the global motion of a scene's bounding box using rigid transformation along a trajectory parameterized by a spline. We learn local deformations that conform to the global trajectory using supervision from a text-to-video model. Our approach enables the synthesis of scenes animated along arbitrary trajectories, compositional scene generation, and significant improvements to the realism and amount of generated motion, which we evaluate qualitatively and through a user study. Video results can be viewed on our website: https://sherwinbahmani.github.io/tc4d.

Understanding the dynamic physical world, characterized by its evolving 3D structure, real-world motion, and semantic content with textual descriptions, is crucial for human-agent interaction and enables embodied agents to perceive and act within real environments with human-like capabilities. However, existing datasets are often derived from limited simulators or utilize traditional Structurefrom-Motion for up-to-scale annotation and offer limited descriptive captioning, which restricts the capacity of foundation models to accurately interpret real-world dynamics from monocular videos, commonly sourced from the internet. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DynamicVerse, a physical-scale, multimodal 4D world modeling framework for dynamic real-world video. We employ large vision, geometric, and multimodal models to interpret metric-scale static geometry, real-world dynamic motion, instance-level masks, and holistic descriptive captions. By integrating window-based Bundle Adjustment with global optimization, our method converts long real-world video sequences into a comprehensive 4D multimodal format. DynamicVerse delivers a large-scale dataset consisting of 100K+ videos with 800K+ annotated masks and 10M+ frames from internet videos. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark tasks, namely video depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and camera intrinsics estimation, demonstrate that our 4D modeling achieves superior performance in capturing physical-scale measurements with greater global accuracy than existing methods.

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

World Models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations of environment dynamics, enabling agents to reason, plan, and generalize beyond direct experience. Despite recent interest in World Models, most available implementations remain publication-specific, severely limiting their reusability, increasing the risk of bugs, and reducing evaluation standardization. To mitigate these issues, we introduce stable-worldmodel (SWM), a modular, tested, and documented world-model research ecosystem that provides efficient data-collection tools, standardized environments, planning algorithms, and baseline implementations. In addition, each environment in SWM enables controllable factors of variation, including visual and physical properties, to support robustness and continual learning research. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of SWM by using it to study zero-shot robustness in DINO-WM.

We introduce Cosmos-Transfer, a conditional world generation model that can generate world simulations based on multiple spatial control inputs of various modalities such as segmentation, depth, and edge. In the design, the spatial conditional scheme is adaptive and customizable. It allows weighting different conditional inputs differently at different spatial locations. This enables highly controllable world generation and finds use in various world-to-world transfer use cases, including Sim2Real. We conduct extensive evaluations to analyze the proposed model and demonstrate its applications for Physical AI, including robotics Sim2Real and autonomous vehicle data enrichment. We further demonstrate an inference scaling strategy to achieve real-time world generation with an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack. To help accelerate research development in the field, we open-source our models and code at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-transfer1.

Comprehensive panoramic scene understanding is critical for immersive applications, yet it remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-resolution, multi-task annotations. While perspective foundation models have achieved success through data scaling, directly adapting them to the panoramic domain often fails due to severe geometric distortions and coordinate system discrepancies. Furthermore, the underlying relations between diverse dense prediction tasks in spherical spaces are underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose MTPano, a robust multi-task panoramic foundation model established by a label-free training pipeline. First, to circumvent data scarcity, we leverage powerful perspective dense priors. We project panoramic images into perspective patches to generate accurate, domain-gap-free pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf foundation models, which are then re-projected to serve as patch-wise supervision. Second, to tackle the interference between task types, we categorize tasks into rotation-invariant (e.g., depth, segmentation) and rotation-variant (e.g., surface normals) groups. We introduce the Panoramic Dual BridgeNet, which disentangles these feature streams via geometry-aware modulation layers that inject absolute position and ray direction priors. To handle the distortion from equirectangular projections (ERP), we incorporate ERP token mixers followed by a dual-branch BridgeNet for interactions with gradient truncation, facilitating beneficial cross-task information sharing while blocking conflicting gradients from incompatible task attributes. Additionally, we introduce auxiliary tasks (image gradient, point map, etc.) to fertilize the cross-task learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTPano achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and delivers competitive results against task-specific panoramic specialist foundation models.

Language agents increasingly require persistent worlds in which they can act, remember, and learn. Existing approaches sit at two extremes: conventional web frameworks provide reliable but fixed contexts backed by databases, while fully generative world models aim for unlimited environments at the expense of controllability and practical engineering. In this work, we introduce the Web World Model (WWM), a middle ground where world state and ``physics'' are implemented in ordinary web code to ensure logical consistency, while large language models generate context, narratives, and high-level decisions on top of this structured latent state. We build a suite of WWMs on a realistic web stack, including an infinite travel atlas grounded in real geography, fictional galaxy explorers, web-scale encyclopedic and narrative worlds, and simulation- and game-like environments. Across these systems, we identify practical design principles for WWMs: separating code-defined rules from model-driven imagination, representing latent state as typed web interfaces, and utilizing deterministic generation to achieve unlimited but structured exploration. Our results suggest that web stacks themselves can serve as a scalable substrate for world models, enabling controllable yet open-ended environments. Project Page: https://github.com/Princeton-AI2-Lab/Web-World-Models.

World models represent a promising approach for training reinforcement learning agents with significantly improved sample efficiency. While most world model methods primarily rely on sequences of discrete latent variables to model environment dynamics, this compression often neglects critical visual details essential for reinforcement learning. Recent diffusion-based world models condition generation on a fixed context length of frames to predict the next observation, using separate recurrent neural networks to model rewards and termination signals. Although this architecture effectively enhances visual fidelity, the fixed context length approach inherently limits memory capacity. In this paper, we introduce EDELINE, a unified world model architecture that integrates state space models with diffusion models. Our approach outperforms existing baselines across visually challenging Atari 100k tasks, memory-demanding Crafter benchmark, and 3D first-person ViZDoom environments, demonstrating superior performance in all these diverse challenges.

Explorable 3D world generation from a single image or text prompt forms a cornerstone of spatial intelligence. Recent works utilize video model to achieve wide-scope and generalizable 3D world generation. However, existing approaches often suffer from a limited scope in the generated scenes. In this work, we propose Matrix-3D, a framework that utilize panoramic representation for wide-coverage omnidirectional explorable 3D world generation that combines conditional video generation and panoramic 3D reconstruction. We first train a trajectory-guided panoramic video diffusion model that employs scene mesh renders as condition, to enable high-quality and geometrically consistent scene video generation. To lift the panorama scene video to 3D world, we propose two separate methods: (1) a feed-forward large panorama reconstruction model for rapid 3D scene reconstruction and (2) an optimization-based pipeline for accurate and detailed 3D scene reconstruction. To facilitate effective training, we also introduce the Matrix-Pano dataset, the first large-scale synthetic collection comprising 116K high-quality static panoramic video sequences with depth and trajectory annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and 3D world generation. See more in https://matrix-3d.github.io.

Geolocating images of a ground-level scene entails estimating the location on Earth where the picture was taken, in absence of GPS or other location metadata. Typically, methods are evaluated by measuring the Great Circle Distance (GCD) between a predicted location and ground truth. However, this measurement is limited because it only evaluates a single point, not estimates of regions or score heatmaps. This is especially important in applications to rural, wilderness and under-sampled areas, where finding the exact location may not be possible, and when used in aggregate systems that progressively narrow down locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, Recall vs Area (RvA), which measures the accuracy of estimated distributions of locations. RvA treats image geolocation results similarly to document retrieval, measuring recall as a function of area: For a ranked list of (possibly non-contiguous) predicted regions, we measure the accumulated area required for the region to contain the ground truth coordinate. This produces a curve similar to a precision-recall curve, where "precision" is replaced by square kilometers area, allowing evaluation of performance for different downstream search area budgets. Following directly from this view of the problem, we then examine a simple ensembling approach to global-scale image geolocation, which incorporates information from multiple sources to help address domain shift, and can readily incorporate multiple models, attribute predictors, and data sources. We study its effectiveness by combining the geolocation models GeoEstimation and the current SOTA GeoCLIP, with attribute predictors based on ORNL LandScan and ESA-CCI Land Cover. We find significant improvements in image geolocation for areas that are under-represented in the training set, particularly non-urban areas, on both Im2GPS3k and Street View images.

Generating human videos with realistic and controllable motions is a challenging task. While existing methods can generate visually compelling videos, they lack separate control over four key video elements: foreground subject, background video, human trajectory and action patterns. In this paper, we propose a decomposed human motion control and video generation framework that explicitly decouples motion from appearance, subject from background, and action from trajectory, enabling flexible mix-and-match composition of these elements. Concretely, we first build a ground-aware 3D world coordinate system and perform motion editing directly in the 3D space. Trajectory control is implemented by unprojecting edited 2D trajectories into 3D with focal-length calibration and coordinate transformation, followed by speed alignment and orientation adjustment; actions are supplied by a motion bank or generated via text-to-motion methods. Then, based on modern text-to-video diffusion transformer models, we inject the subject as tokens for full attention, concatenate the background along the channel dimension, and add motion (trajectory and action) control signals by addition. Such a design opens up the possibility for us to generate realistic videos of anyone doing anything anywhere. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world cases demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both element-wise controllability and overall video quality.

Egocentric interactive world models are essential for augmented reality and embodied AI, where visual generation must respond to user input with low latency, geometric consistency, and long-term stability. We study egocentric interaction generation from a single scene image under free-space hand gestures, aiming to synthesize photorealistic videos in which hands enter the scene, interact with objects, and induce plausible world dynamics under head motion. This setting introduces fundamental challenges, including distribution shift between free-space gestures and contact-heavy training data, ambiguity between hand motion and camera motion in monocular views, and the need for arbitrary-length video generation. We present Hand2World, a unified autoregressive framework that addresses these challenges through occlusion-invariant hand conditioning based on projected 3D hand meshes, allowing visibility and occlusion to be inferred from scene context rather than encoded in the control signal. To stabilize egocentric viewpoint changes, we inject explicit camera geometry via per-pixel Plücker-ray embeddings, disentangling camera motion from hand motion and preventing background drift. We further develop a fully automated monocular annotation pipeline and distill a bidirectional diffusion model into a causal generator, enabling arbitrary-length synthesis. Experiments on three egocentric interaction benchmarks show substantial improvements in perceptual quality and 3D consistency while supporting camera control and long-horizon interactive generation.

Estimating the 3D trajectory of every pixel from a monocular video is crucial and promising for a comprehensive understanding of the 3D dynamics of videos. Recent monocular 3D tracking works demonstrate impressive performance, but are limited to either tracking sparse points on the first frame or a slow optimization-based framework for dense tracking. In this paper, we propose a feedforward model, called Track4World, enabling an efficient holistic 3D tracking of every pixel in the world-centric coordinate system. Built on the global 3D scene representation encoded by a VGGT-style ViT, Track4World applies a novel 3D correlation scheme to simultaneously estimate the pixel-wise 2D and 3D dense flow between arbitrary frame pairs. The estimated scene flow, along with the reconstructed 3D geometry, enables subsequent efficient 3D tracking of every pixel of this video. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods in 2D/3D flow estimation and 3D tracking, highlighting its robustness and scalability for real-world 4D reconstruction tasks.

Despite the advent in 3D hand pose estimation, current methods predominantly focus on single-image 3D hand reconstruction in the camera frame, overlooking the world-space motion of the hands. Such limitation prohibits their direct use in egocentric video settings, where hands and camera are continuously in motion. In this work, we propose HaWoR, a high-fidelity method for hand motion reconstruction in world coordinates from egocentric videos. We propose to decouple the task by reconstructing the hand motion in the camera space and estimating the camera trajectory in the world coordinate system. To achieve precise camera trajectory estimation, we propose an adaptive egocentric SLAM framework that addresses the shortcomings of traditional SLAM methods, providing robust performance under challenging camera dynamics. To ensure robust hand motion trajectories, even when the hands move out of view frustum, we devise a novel motion infiller network that effectively completes the missing frames of the sequence. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that HaWoR achieves state-of-the-art performance on both hand motion reconstruction and world-frame camera trajectory estimation under different egocentric benchmark datasets. Code and models are available on https://hawor-project.github.io/ .

Dexterous manipulation is challenging because it requires understanding how subtle hand motion influences the environment through contact with objects. We introduce DexWM, a Dexterous Manipulation World Model that predicts the next latent state of the environment conditioned on past states and dexterous actions. To overcome the scarcity of dexterous manipulation datasets, DexWM is trained on over 900 hours of human and non-dexterous robot videos. To enable fine-grained dexterity, we find that predicting visual features alone is insufficient; therefore, we introduce an auxiliary hand consistency loss that enforces accurate hand configurations. DexWM outperforms prior world models conditioned on text, navigation, and full-body actions, achieving more accurate predictions of future states. DexWM also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to unseen manipulation skills when deployed on a Franka Panda arm equipped with an Allegro gripper, outperforming Diffusion Policy by over 50% on average in grasping, placing, and reaching tasks.

Creating controllable, photorealistic, and geometrically detailed digital doubles of real humans solely from video data is a key challenge in Computer Graphics and Vision, especially when real-time performance is required. Recent methods attach a neural radiance field (NeRF) to an articulated structure, e.g., a body model or a skeleton, to map points into a pose canonical space while conditioning the NeRF on the skeletal pose. These approaches typically parameterize the neural field with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) leading to a slow runtime. To address this drawback, we propose TriHuman a novel human-tailored, deformable, and efficient tri-plane representation, which achieves real-time performance, state-of-the-art pose-controllable geometry synthesis as well as photorealistic rendering quality. At the core, we non-rigidly warp global ray samples into our undeformed tri-plane texture space, which effectively addresses the problem of global points being mapped to the same tri-plane locations. We then show how such a tri-plane feature representation can be conditioned on the skeletal motion to account for dynamic appearance and geometry changes. Our results demonstrate a clear step towards higher quality in terms of geometry and appearance modeling of humans as well as runtime performance.

Generating 3D worlds from text is a highly anticipated goal in computer vision. Existing works are limited by the degree of exploration they allow inside of a scene, i.e., produce streched-out and noisy artifacts when moving beyond central or panoramic perspectives. To this end, we propose WorldExplorer, a novel method based on autoregressive video trajectory generation, which builds fully navigable 3D scenes with consistent visual quality across a wide range of viewpoints. We initialize our scenes by creating multi-view consistent images corresponding to a 360 degree panorama. Then, we expand it by leveraging video diffusion models in an iterative scene generation pipeline. Concretely, we generate multiple videos along short, pre-defined trajectories, that explore the scene in depth, including motion around objects. Our novel scene memory conditions each video on the most relevant prior views, while a collision-detection mechanism prevents degenerate results, like moving into objects. Finally, we fuse all generated views into a unified 3D representation via 3D Gaussian Splatting optimization. Compared to prior approaches, WorldExplorer produces high-quality scenes that remain stable under large camera motion, enabling for the first time realistic and unrestricted exploration. We believe this marks a significant step toward generating immersive and truly explorable virtual 3D environments.

Embodied systems experience the world as 'a symphony of flows': a combination of many continuous streams of sensory input coupled to self-motion, interwoven with the dynamics of external objects. These streams obey smooth, time-parameterized symmetries, which combine through a precisely structured algebra; yet most neural network world models ignore this structure and instead repeatedly re-learn the same transformations from data. In this work, we introduce 'Flow Equivariant World Models', a framework in which both self-motion and external object motion are unified as one-parameter Lie group 'flows'. We leverage this unification to implement group equivariance with respect to these transformations, thereby providing a stable latent world representation over hundreds of timesteps. On both 2D and 3D partially observed video world modeling benchmarks, we demonstrate that Flow Equivariant World Models significantly outperform comparable state-of-the-art diffusion-based and memory-augmented world modeling architectures -- particularly when there are predictable world dynamics outside the agent's current field of view. We show that flow equivariance is particularly beneficial for long rollouts, generalizing far beyond the training horizon. By structuring world model representations with respect to internal and external motion, flow equivariance charts a scalable route to data efficient, symmetry-guided, embodied intelligence. Project link: https://flowequivariantworldmodels.github.io.

Video world models aim to simulate dynamic, real-world environments, yet existing methods struggle to provide unified and precise control over camera and multi-object motion, as videos inherently operate dynamics in the projected 2D image plane. To bridge this gap, we introduce VerseCrafter, a 4D-aware video world model that enables explicit and coherent control over both camera and object dynamics within a unified 4D geometric world state. Our approach is centered on a novel 4D Geometric Control representation, which encodes the world state through a static background point cloud and per-object 3D Gaussian trajectories. This representation captures not only an object's path but also its probabilistic 3D occupancy over time, offering a flexible, category-agnostic alternative to rigid bounding boxes or parametric models. These 4D controls are rendered into conditioning signals for a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling the generation of high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that precisely adhere to the specified dynamics. Unfortunately, another major challenge lies in the scarcity of large-scale training data with explicit 4D annotations. We address this by developing an automatic data engine that extracts the required 4D controls from in-the-wild videos, allowing us to train our model on a massive and diverse dataset.

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

The next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation task aims to predict users' next destinations based on their historical movement data and plays a key role in location-based services and personalized applications. Accurate next POI recommendation depends on effectively modeling geographic information and POI transition relations, which are crucial for capturing spatial dependencies and user movement patterns. While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual reasoning, applying them to spatial tasks like next POI recommendation remains challenging. First, the infrequent nature of specific GPS coordinates makes it difficult for LLMs to model precise spatial contexts. Second, the lack of knowledge about POI transitions limits their ability to capture potential POI-POI relationships. To address these issues, we propose GA-LLM (Geography-Aware Large Language Model), a novel framework that enhances LLMs with two specialized components. The Geographic Coordinate Injection Module (GCIM) transforms GPS coordinates into spatial representations using hierarchical and Fourier-based positional encoding, enabling the model to understand geographic features from multiple perspectives. The POI Alignment Module (PAM) incorporates POI transition relations into the LLM's semantic space, allowing it to infer global POI relationships and generalize to unseen POIs. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of GA-LLM.

World models (WMs) are intended to serve as internal simulators of the real world that enable agents to understand, anticipate, and act upon complex environments. Existing WM benchmarks remain narrowly focused on next-state prediction and visual fidelity, overlooking the richer simulation capabilities required for intelligent behavior. To address this gap, we introduce WR-Arena, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating WMs along three fundamental dimensions of next world simulation: (i) Action Simulation Fidelity, the ability to interpret and follow semantically meaningful, multi-step instructions and generate diverse counterfactual rollouts; (ii) Long-horizon Forecast, the ability to sustain accurate, coherent, and physically plausible simulations across extended interactions; and (iii) Simulative Reasoning and Planning, the ability to support goal-directed reasoning by simulating, comparing, and selecting among alternative futures in both structured and open-ended environments. We build a task taxonomy and curate diverse datasets designed to probe these capabilities, moving beyond single-turn and perceptual evaluations. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art WMs, our results expose a substantial gap between current models and human-level hypothetical reasoning, and establish WR-Arena as both a diagnostic tool and a guideline for advancing next-generation world models capable of robust understanding, forecasting, and purposeful action. The code is available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-IFM/WR-Arena.

World models are emerging as a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, enabling agents to construct internal representations of their environments for predictive reasoning, planning, and decision-making. By learning latent dynamics, world models provide a sample-efficient framework that is especially valuable in data-constrained or safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of world models, highlighting their architecture, training paradigms, and applications across prediction, generation, planning, and causal reasoning. We compare and distinguish world models from related concepts such as digital twins, the metaverse, and foundation models, clarifying their unique role as embedded cognitive engines for autonomous agents. We further propose Wireless Dreamer, a novel world model-based reinforcement learning framework tailored for wireless edge intelligence optimization, particularly in low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs). Through a weather-aware UAV trajectory planning case study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving learning efficiency and decision quality.

Recent advances in driving-scene generation and reconstruction have demonstrated significant potential for enhancing autonomous driving systems by producing scalable and controllable training data. Existing generation methods primarily focus on synthesizing diverse and high-fidelity driving videos; however, due to limited 3D consistency and sparse viewpoint coverage, they struggle to support convenient and high-quality novel-view synthesis (NVS). Conversely, recent 3D/4D reconstruction approaches have significantly improved NVS for real-world driving scenes, yet inherently lack generative capabilities. To overcome this dilemma between scene generation and reconstruction, we propose WorldSplat, a novel feed-forward framework for 4D driving-scene generation. Our approach effectively generates consistent multi-track videos through two key steps: (i) We introduce a 4D-aware latent diffusion model integrating multi-modal information to produce pixel-aligned 4D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. (ii) Subsequently, we refine the novel view videos rendered from these Gaussians using a enhanced video diffusion model. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate that WorldSplat effectively generates high-fidelity, temporally and spatially consistent multi-track novel view driving videos. Project: https://wm-research.github.io/worldsplat/

From a single image, visual cues can help deduce intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters like the focal length and the gravity direction. This single-image calibration can benefit various downstream applications like image editing and 3D mapping. Current approaches to this problem are based on either classical geometry with lines and vanishing points or on deep neural networks trained end-to-end. The learned approaches are more robust but struggle to generalize to new environments and are less accurate than their classical counterparts. We hypothesize that they lack the constraints that 3D geometry provides. In this work, we introduce GeoCalib, a deep neural network that leverages universal rules of 3D geometry through an optimization process. GeoCalib is trained end-to-end to estimate camera parameters and learns to find useful visual cues from the data. Experiments on various benchmarks show that GeoCalib is more robust and more accurate than existing classical and learned approaches. Its internal optimization estimates uncertainties, which help flag failure cases and benefit downstream applications like visual localization. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/GeoCalib.

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

Emerging 3D geometric foundation models, such as DUSt3R, offer a promising approach for in-the-wild 3D vision tasks. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multi-view predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering.

We propose a system for rearranging objects in a scene to achieve a desired object-scene placing relationship, such as a book inserted in an open slot of a bookshelf. The pipeline generalizes to novel geometries, poses, and layouts of both scenes and objects, and is trained from demonstrations to operate directly on 3D point clouds. Our system overcomes challenges associated with the existence of many geometrically-similar rearrangement solutions for a given scene. By leveraging an iterative pose de-noising training procedure, we can fit multi-modal demonstration data and produce multi-modal outputs while remaining precise and accurate. We also show the advantages of conditioning on relevant local geometric features while ignoring irrelevant global structure that harms both generalization and precision. We demonstrate our approach on three distinct rearrangement tasks that require handling multi-modality and generalization over object shape and pose in both simulation and the real world. Project website, code, and videos: https://anthonysimeonov.github.io/rpdiff-multi-modal/

Recent progress in 3D reconstruction has made it easy to create realistic digital twins from everyday environments. However, current digital twins remain largely static and are limited to navigation and view synthesis without embodied interactivity. To bridge this gap, we introduce Dexterous World Model (DWM), a scene-action-conditioned video diffusion framework that models how dexterous human actions induce dynamic changes in static 3D scenes. Given a static 3D scene rendering and an egocentric hand motion sequence, DWM generates temporally coherent videos depicting plausible human-scene interactions. Our approach conditions video generation on (1) static scene renderings following a specified camera trajectory to ensure spatial consistency, and (2) egocentric hand mesh renderings that encode both geometry and motion cues to model action-conditioned dynamics directly. To train DWM, we construct a hybrid interaction video dataset. Synthetic egocentric interactions provide fully aligned supervision for joint locomotion and manipulation learning, while fixed-camera real-world videos contribute diverse and realistic object dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that DWM enables realistic and physically plausible interactions, such as grasping, opening, and moving objects, while maintaining camera and scene consistency. This framework represents a first step toward video diffusion-based interactive digital twins and enables embodied simulation from egocentric actions.

Point cloud registration is challenging in the presence of heavy outlier correspondences. This paper focuses on addressing the robust correspondence-based registration problem with gravity prior that often arises in practice. The gravity directions are typically obtained by inertial measurement units (IMUs) and can reduce the degree of freedom (DOF) of rotation from 3 to 1. We propose a novel transformation decoupling strategy by leveraging screw theory. This strategy decomposes the original 4-DOF problem into three sub-problems with 1-DOF, 2-DOF, and 1-DOF, respectively, thereby enhancing the computation efficiency. Specifically, the first 1-DOF represents the translation along the rotation axis and we propose an interval stabbing-based method to solve it. The second 2-DOF represents the pole which is an auxiliary variable in screw theory and we utilize a branch-and-bound method to solve it. The last 1-DOF represents the rotation angle and we propose a global voting method for its estimation. The proposed method sequentially solves three consensus maximization sub-problems, leading to efficient and deterministic registration. In particular, it can even handle the correspondence-free registration problem due to its significant robustness. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is more efficient and robust than state-of-the-art methods, even when dealing with outlier rates exceeding 99%.

Video generation models have rapidly progressed, positioning themselves as video world models capable of supporting decision-making applications like robotics and autonomous driving. However, current benchmarks fail to rigorously evaluate these claims, focusing only on general video quality, ignoring important factors to world models such as physics adherence. To bridge this gap, we propose WorldModelBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the world modeling capabilities of video generation models in application-driven domains. WorldModelBench offers two key advantages: (1) Against to nuanced world modeling violations: By incorporating instruction-following and physics-adherence dimensions, WorldModelBench detects subtle violations, such as irregular changes in object size that breach the mass conservation law - issues overlooked by prior benchmarks. (2) Aligned with large-scale human preferences: We crowd-source 67K human labels to accurately measure 14 frontier models. Using our high-quality human labels, we further fine-tune an accurate judger to automate the evaluation procedure, achieving 8.6% higher average accuracy in predicting world modeling violations than GPT-4o with 2B parameters. In addition, we demonstrate that training to align human annotations by maximizing the rewards from the judger noticeably improve the world modeling capability. The website is available at https://worldmodelbench-team.github.io.

Trained on internet-scale video data, generative world models are increasingly recognized as powerful world simulators that can generate consistent and plausible dynamics over structure, motion, and physics. This raises a natural question: with the advent of strong video foundational models, might they supplant conventional vision encoder paradigms for general-purpose multimodal understanding? While recent studies have begun to explore the potential of world models on common vision tasks, these explorations typically lack a systematic investigation of generic, multimodal tasks. In this work, we strive to investigate the capabilities when world model priors are transferred into Vision-Language Models: we re-purpose a video diffusion model as a generative encoder to perform a single denoising step and treat the resulting latents as a set of visual embedding. We empirically investigate this class of models, which we refer to as World-Language Models (WorldLMs), and we find that generative encoders can capture latents useful for downstream understanding that show distinctions from conventional encoders. Naming our best-performing variant Dynamic Vision Aligner (DyVA), we further discover that this method significantly enhances spatial reasoning abilities and enables single-image models to perform multi-frame reasoning. Through the curation of a suite of visual reasoning tasks, we find DyVA to surpass both open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable performance. We attribute these gains to WorldLM's inherited motion-consistency internalization from video pre-training. Finally, we systematically explore extensive model designs to highlight promising directions for future work. We hope our study can pave the way for a new family of VLMs that leverage priors from world models and are on a promising path towards generalist vision learners.