Daily Papers

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.

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.

Building generalizable agents for diverse applications remains a fundamental challenge. While imitation learning-based policies succeed in specific training environments, they often fail to generalize to novel scenes and tasks. In this work, we propose World Action Planner, a robot planning system that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the physical grounding of a multi-task pose-image conditioned world model. Our system enables an agent to propose initial action plans and iteratively refine them via optimization and search, reasoning over imagined world model rollouts. We demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance across compositional tasks, new layouts, and zero-shot generalization scenarios, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end policy models such as VLAs and WAMs. Project website at worldactionplanner.github.io

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable progress by integrating perception, prediction, and planning into a fully differentiable framework. Yet, to fully realize its potential, an effective online trajectory evaluation is indispensable to ensure safety. By forecasting the future outcomes of a given trajectory, trajectory evaluation becomes much more effective. This goal can be achieved by employing a world model to capture environmental dynamics and predict future states. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end driving framework WoTE, which leverages a BEV World model to predict future BEV states for Trajectory Evaluation. The proposed BEV world model is latency-efficient compared to image-level world models and can be seamlessly supervised using off-the-shelf BEV-space traffic simulators. We validate our framework on both the NAVSIM benchmark and the closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark based on the CARLA simulator, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at https://github.com/liyingyanUCAS/WoTE.

Interactive video generation models such as Genie, YUME, HY-World, and Matrix-Game are advancing rapidly, yet every model is evaluated on its own benchmark with private scenes and trajectories, making fair cross-model comparison impossible. Existing public benchmarks offer useful metrics such as trajectory error, aesthetic scores, and VLM-based judgments, but none supplies the standardized test conditions -- identical scenes, identical action sequences, and a unified control interface -- needed to make those metrics comparable across models with heterogeneous inputs. We introduce WorldMark, the first benchmark that provides such a common playing field for interactive Image-to-Video world models. WorldMark contributes: (1) a unified action-mapping layer that translates a shared WASD-style action vocabulary into each model's native control format, enabling apples-to-apples comparison across six major models on identical scenes and trajectories; (2) a hierarchical test suite of 500 evaluation cases covering first- and third-person viewpoints, photorealistic and stylized scenes, and three difficulty tiers from Easy to Hard spanning 20-60s; and (3) a modular evaluation toolkit for Visual Quality, Control Alignment, and World Consistency, designed so that researchers can reuse our standardized inputs while plugging in their own metrics as the field evolves. We will release all data, evaluation code, and model outputs to facilitate future research. Beyond offline metrics, we launch World Model Arena (warena.ai), an online platform where anyone can pit leading world models against each other in side-by-side battles and watch the live leaderboard.

Real-world image restoration (IR) is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality paired training data. Synthetic datasets are abundant but often fail to model real-world degradations, while real-world paired datasets are expensive and difficult to capture. As a result, IR models trained on these datasets show limited generalization in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose Generative Ground Truth (GGT) by using generative multimodal foundation models (MFMs) to produce high-quality (HQ) targets from real-world low-quality (LQ) images. We first conduct a systematic evaluation of nine state-of-the-art MFMs, including Nano-Banana-2 and GPT-Image-2, on images of various scenes and degradation types. The results demonstrate that Nano-Banana-2 with VLM-based adaptive prompting shows the highest capability to synthesize perceptually realistic and content-faithful HQ targets, which can serve as the GGT for the LQ input. We then employ Nano-Banana-2 to build a GGT synthesis pipeline, which involves multi-stage quality control to ensure data reliability, and construct GGT-100K, an LQ-HQ paired dataset comprising 103,707 training pairs and covering diverse scenes and complex real-world degradations. A test set of 500 image pairs is also established. Extensive experiments show that GGT-100K consistently improves the real-world generalization of a wide range of IR models, with particularly strong benefits for finetuning generative models for IR tasks. Our results suggest that MFMs can serve as practical tools for restoration-oriented data generation, and GGT-100K is a useful resource to expand the generalization boundaries of real-world IR models.

We present an architecture and a training recipe that adapts pre-trained open-world image models to localization in videos. Understanding the open visual world (without being constrained by fixed label spaces) is crucial for many real-world vision tasks. Contrastive pre-training on large image-text datasets has recently led to significant improvements for image-level tasks. For more structured tasks involving object localization applying pre-trained models is more challenging. This is particularly true for video tasks, where task-specific data is limited. We show successful transfer of open-world models by building on the OWL-ViT open-vocabulary detection model and adapting it to video by adding a transformer decoder. The decoder propagates object representations recurrently through time by using the output tokens for one frame as the object queries for the next. Our model is end-to-end trainable on video data and enjoys improved temporal consistency compared to tracking-by-detection baselines, while retaining the open-world capabilities of the backbone detector. We evaluate our model on the challenging TAO-OW benchmark and demonstrate that open-world capabilities, learned from large-scale image-text pre-training, can be transferred successfully to open-world localization across diverse videos.

Given the remarkable ability of 2D foundation image models to generate high-fidelity outputs, we investigate a fundamental question: do 2D foundation image models inherently possess 3D world model capabilities? To answer this, we systematically evaluate multiple state-of-the-art image generation models and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on the task of 3D world synthesis. To harness and benchmark their potential implicit 3D capability, we propose an agentic framing to facilitate 3D world generation. Our approach employs a multi-agent architecture: a VLM-based director that formulates prompts to guide image synthesis, a generator that synthesizes new image views, and a VLM-backed two-step verifier that evaluates and selectively curates generated frames from both 2D image and 3D reconstruction space. Crucially, we demonstrate that our agentic approach provides coherent and robust 3D reconstruction, producing output scenes that can be explored by rendering novel views. Through extensive experiments across various foundation models, we demonstrate that 2D models do indeed encapsulate a grasp of 3D worlds. By exploiting this understanding, our method successfully synthesizes expansive, realistic, and 3D-consistent worlds.

GUI agents require high-quality interaction trajectories to learn how software environments respond to actions, maintain state, and support multi-step workflows. However, the diversity of available trajectories is constrained by the applications, interface states, and workflows accessible in the underlying environments. Expanding this coverage requires deploying increasingly diverse and complex software, with specialized applications imposing additional installation, configuration, and runtime costs. We introduce AutoGUIWorld, a data generation framework that combines the visual priors of image generators with the task knowledge of a planner to synthesize GUI interaction trajectories without deploying or running the corresponding software environments. AutoGUIWorld samples initial GUI scenes from structured specifications of operating-system context, visual appearance, and interface state, and generates tasks conditioned on those scenes. A planner then specifies atomic actions and their intended visual consequences, while an image generator iteratively edits the current screenshot to produce subsequent observations. Action grounding and transition-level quality filtering yield 79,266 spatially annotated step-level training samples across Ubuntu, Windows, macOS, and Chrome. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on AutoGUIWorld trajectories improves the mean task score on OSWorld from 33.0% to 40.8% and the task success rate on ScienceBoard from 14.0% to 32.2%. These results show that generated trajectories improve GUI-agent performance on real desktop and scientific tasks.

Several text-to-video diffusion models have demonstrated commendable capabilities in synthesizing high-quality video content. However, it remains a formidable challenge pertaining to maintaining temporal consistency and ensuring action smoothness throughout the generated sequences. In this paper, we present an innovative video generation AI agent that harnesses the power of Sora-inspired multimodal learning to build skilled world models framework based on textual prompts and accompanying images. The framework includes two parts: prompt enhancer and full video translation. The first part employs the capabilities of ChatGPT to meticulously distill and proactively construct precise prompts for each subsequent step, thereby guaranteeing the utmost accuracy in prompt communication and accurate execution in following model operations. The second part employ compatible with existing advanced diffusion techniques to expansively generate and refine the key frame at the conclusion of a video. Then we can expertly harness the power of leading and trailing key frames to craft videos with enhanced temporal consistency and action smoothness. The experimental results confirm that our method has strong effectiveness and novelty in constructing world models from text and image inputs over the other methods.

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.

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

This paper shows that JEPA-style latent world models (LWMs) can learn across diverse domains and data sources by adopting the language-conditioned interface of video generation models. We establish this approach as an effective and efficient basis for planning with imagination and downstream policy fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce LaLa-World, a Language-conditioned Latent World model that learns from simulation and robot trajectories together with broader image and video data. Two designs make this work. First, we describe both numerical actions and visual changes in language, enabling joint training of a single future predictor across heterogeneous datasets. Second, we build the predictor on a language model, allowing it to interpret language conditions while predicting future latent states. The resulting predictor achieves higher average MPC planning performance than existing LWMs trained separately for each domain or task. Adding image and video data further improves average planning performance and robustness to action phrasing. In a matched comparison with an RAEv2-based video generation model baseline, LaLa-World reaches comparable planning performance with 6times less training cost and 13.9times faster planning. Beyond planning, the pretrained LaLa-World serves as an initialization for LaLa-Policy, which jointly predicts actions and future visual representations. LaLa-Policy performs competitively with Cosmos Policy on LIBERO and RoboCasa, with up to 5.5times faster inference.

Latent world models are inherently strong encoders that transform image pixel to latent embedding, yet existing world models still rely on online trajectory optimization for action planning: for every state-goal pair, an iterative optimizer is run from scratch to search for optimal action sequences, treating the world model as a black-box simulator. This approach pays the full iterative optimization cost anew at every replanning step and reuses no planning experience across queries. In this work, we ask whether planning itself can be amortized once a latent world model has been learned. We present LeFlow, which learns a reusable latent trajectory prior operating directly in the latent dynamics space from the world model. LeFlow recasts planning as conditional latent trajectory generation: a rectified-flow model imagines a future latent path between the current and goal embeddings, an inverse dynamics decoder turns latent transitions into action chunks, and the frozen world model verifies each candidate by autoregressive rollout. Across four major goal-conditioned pixel-control benchmarks, LeFlow replaces iterative action-space optimization with amortized latent planning and fixed-budget rollout selection, achieving consistent success-rate gains with an order-of-magnitude reduction in planning time. Our results argue that latent world models should support not only prediction but reusable planning priors. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/LeFlow.

Multiplayer world models must generate independently controlled views with consistent representations of both players and their shared environment. Most existing approaches coordinate multiple players through joint multi-view generation, whose cost grows with each additional player. We present WorldCast, a distributed multiplayer world model in which each player runs a local client comprising a video generator and a state model. Using recorded player positions and map geometry during training, the state model estimates the player's position from generated video and control inputs. Clients exchange player states and project them into camera-aligned player state fields that guide where and how other players are rendered. Shared scene state enables clients to reuse one another's generated observations to maintain consistent scene appearance across views. Experiments on Counter-Strike 2 demonstrate WorldCast's consistency, real-time performance, and distributed scalability. The camera-aligned player state field improves player rendering rates by over an order of magnitude over joint-generation methods, while shared scene state improves visual consistency over whole rounds. Each client runs in real time and exchanges only player and scene states, enabling scalable multiplayer generation without a centralized computational bottleneck. Image quality remains stable over hour-long rollouts.

To what extent do vision-and-language foundation models possess a realistic world model (observation times action rightarrow observation) and a dynamics model (observation times observation rightarrow action), when actions are expressed through language? While open-source foundation models struggle with both, we find that fine-tuning them to acquire a dynamics model through supervision is significantly easier than acquiring a world model. In turn, dynamics models can be used to bootstrap world models through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, the dynamics model can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data. We further propose a new objective, where image tokens in observation pairs are weighted by their importance, as predicted by a recognition model. Secondly, the dynamics models can assign rewards to multiple samples of the world model to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the world models resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench. Our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin of 15% on real-world subsets according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.

Large-scale generative models have achieved remarkable success in a number of domains. However, for sequential decision-making problems, such as robotics, action-labelled data is often scarce and therefore scaling-up foundation models for decision-making remains a challenge. A potential solution lies in leveraging widely-available unlabelled videos to train world models that simulate the consequences of actions. If the world model is accurate, it can be used to optimize decision-making in downstream tasks. Image-to-video diffusion models are already capable of generating highly realistic synthetic videos. However, these models are not action-conditioned, and the most powerful models are closed-source which means they cannot be finetuned. In this work, we propose to adapt pretrained video diffusion models to action-conditioned world models, without access to the parameters of the pretrained model. Our approach, AVID, trains an adapter on a small domain-specific dataset of action-labelled videos. AVID uses a learned mask to modify the intermediate outputs of the pretrained model and generate accurate action-conditioned videos. We evaluate AVID on video game and real-world robotics data, and show that it outperforms existing baselines for diffusion model adaptation.1 Our results demonstrate that if utilized correctly, pretrained video models have the potential to be powerful tools for embodied AI.

World models enable planning in imagined future predicted space, offering a promising framework for embodied navigation. However, existing navigation world models often lack action-conditioned consistency, so visually plausible predictions can still drift under multi-step rollout and degrade planning. Moreover, efficient deployment requires few-step diffusion inference, but existing distillation methods do not explicitly preserve rollout consistency, creating a training-inference mismatch. To address these challenges, we propose MWM, a mobile world model for planning-based image-goal navigation. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage training framework that combines structure pretraining with Action-Conditioned Consistency (ACC) post-training to improve action-conditioned rollout consistency. We further introduce Inference-Consistent State Distillation (ICSD) for few-step diffusion distillation with improved rollout consistency. Our experiments on benchmark and real-world tasks demonstrate consistent gains in visual fidelity, trajectory accuracy, planning success, and inference efficiency. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MWM. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MWM.

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

Intelligent agents need to generalize from past experience to achieve goals in complex environments. World models facilitate such generalization and allow learning behaviors from imagined outcomes to increase sample-efficiency. While learning world models from image inputs has recently become feasible for some tasks, modeling Atari games accurately enough to derive successful behaviors has remained an open challenge for many years. We introduce DreamerV2, a reinforcement learning agent that learns behaviors purely from predictions in the compact latent space of a powerful world model. The world model uses discrete representations and is trained separately from the policy. DreamerV2 constitutes the first agent that achieves human-level performance on the Atari benchmark of 55 tasks by learning behaviors inside a separately trained world model. With the same computational budget and wall-clock time, Dreamer V2 reaches 200M frames and surpasses the final performance of the top single-GPU agents IQN and Rainbow. DreamerV2 is also applicable to tasks with continuous actions, where it learns an accurate world model of a complex humanoid robot and solves stand-up and walking from only pixel inputs.

Video world models can produce visually convincing yet physically inconsistent sequences, raising concerns about their reliability for prediction and planning in embodied AI systems. Existing evaluations often rely on model-based judgments or reference videos, while direct physical tests largely focus on mechanics. We introduce World Models' Last Exam in Physics, a measurement-based benchmark for evaluating physical consistency in video world models. The benchmark comprises 40 controlled tasks spanning mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal and phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension. Each task pairs an initial image and a generation prompt with predefined physical criteria, enabling interpretable tests of observable physical relationships without requiring reference videos. Its evaluator combines task-observability screening with task-specific quantitative physical measurements. Experiments on eight video generation models across 1,280 videos reveal persistent physical inconsistencies and substantial variation across tasks, with the best model achieving an overall score of 57.76 out of 100. Evaluation on synthetic videos with known physical relationships provides evidence for the validity of the measurement module under controlled conditions. The evaluator also achieves higher agreement with human judgments than a direct vision-language model baseline in both within-task rankings and pairwise comparisons. By combining coverage across physical domains with scores grounded in measurable evidence and explicit measurement limitations, the benchmark provides an interpretable basis for diagnosing physical inconsistencies and tracking progress toward physically consistent video world models.

Synthesizing realistic Martian landscape videos is crucial for mission rehearsal and robotic simulation. However, this task poses unique challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality Martian data and the significant domain gap between Martian and terrestrial imagery. To address these challenges, we propose a holistic solution composed of two key components: 1) A data curation pipeline Multimodal Mars Synthesis (M3arsSynth), which reconstructs 3D Martian environments from real stereo navigation images, sourced from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS), and renders high-fidelity multiview 3D video sequences. 2) A Martian terrain video generator, MarsGen, which synthesizes novel videos visually realistic and geometrically consistent with the 3D structure encoded in the data. Our M3arsSynth engine spans a wide range of Martian terrains and acquisition dates, enabling the generation of physically accurate 3D surface models at metric-scale resolution. MarsGen, fine-tuned on M3arsSynth data, synthesizes videos conditioned on an initial image frame and, optionally, camera trajectories or textual prompts, allowing for video generation in novel environments. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms video synthesis models trained on terrestrial datasets, achieving superior visual fidelity and 3D structural 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.

A central challenge in image-based Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) is to learn representations that distill essential information from irrelevant visual details. While promising, reconstruction-based methods often waste capacity on large task-irrelevant regions. Decoder-free methods instead learn robust representations by leveraging Data Augmentation (DA), but reliance on such external regularizers limits versatility. We propose R2-Dreamer, a decoder-free MBRL framework with a self-supervised objective that serves as an internal regularizer, preventing representation collapse without resorting to DA. The core of our method is a redundancy-reduction objective inspired by Barlow Twins, which can be easily integrated into existing frameworks. On DeepMind Control Suite and Meta-World, R2-Dreamer is competitive with strong baselines such as DreamerV3 and TD-MPC2 while training 1.59x faster than DreamerV3, and yields substantial gains on DMC-Subtle with tiny task-relevant objects. These results suggest that an effective internal regularizer can enable versatile, high-performance decoder-free MBRL. Code is available at https://github.com/NM512/r2dreamer.

Navigation is a fundamental skill of agents with visual-motor capabilities. We introduce a Navigation World Model (NWM), a controllable video generation model that predicts future visual observations based on past observations and navigation actions. To capture complex environment dynamics, NWM employs a Conditional Diffusion Transformer (CDiT), trained on a diverse collection of egocentric videos of both human and robotic agents, and scaled up to 1 billion parameters. In familiar environments, NWM can plan navigation trajectories by simulating them and evaluating whether they achieve the desired goal. Unlike supervised navigation policies with fixed behavior, NWM can dynamically incorporate constraints during planning. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in planning trajectories from scratch or by ranking trajectories sampled from an external policy. Furthermore, NWM leverages its learned visual priors to imagine trajectories in unfamiliar environments from a single input image, making it a flexible and powerful tool for next-generation navigation systems.

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.

World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm

Code world models represent worlds as executable programs, but this representation alone does not determine how to construct a complex world. We introduce Recursive Code World Models (RCWM), a framework for reconstructing complex 3D worlds in code from a single reference image. RCWM couples a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. An RSP represents the executable world as compositional scene code, while each solver call follows the same complete process: establish the whole, recursively reconstruct unresolved parts, and revisit the whole to refine their composition. This global-local-global recursion gives fine-scale structures their own perception-and-editing loops while preserving scene-wide geometry and relationships. Reference-aligned views propagate a shared camera projection across levels, while parent revisitation addresses boundaries, spatial relations, and shared errors that emerge after local refinement. A vision-language coding agent directly compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement, recursive descent, and return. Across complex scenes, RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods. Ablation studies further support the benefits of recursive construction and suggest that deeper calls can improve finer-scale reconstruction. RCWM provides a recursive construction principle for building complex executable worlds from visual evidence.

Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models with Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). We identify two reasons as major bottlenecks: dealing with complex and unstructured observation space, and having a scalable generative model. Consequently, we propose a novel world modeling approach that first tokenizes sensor observations with VQVAE, then predicts the future via discrete diffusion. To efficiently decode and denoise tokens in parallel, we recast Masked Generative Image Transformer into the discrete diffusion framework with a few simple changes, resulting in notable improvement. When applied to learning world models on point cloud observations, our model reduces prior SOTA Chamfer distance by more than 65% for 1s prediction, and more than 50% for 3s prediction, across NuScenes, KITTI Odometry, and Argoverse2 datasets. Our results demonstrate that discrete diffusion on tokenized agent experience can unlock the power of GPT-like unsupervised learning for robotic agents.

Aerial image-goal navigation requires an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to reach a target location specified by a goal image. Existing world-model-based methods rank candidate trajectories using predicted futures, but typically rely on only one or a few point predictions, which is inadequate for large-scale outdoor environments with substantial future-state uncertainty. To address this limitation, we propose the Uncertainty-Aware Navigation World Model (UA-NWM), an efficient latent world model for aerial image-goal navigation, which formulates trajectory scoring as conditional out-of-distribution detection. UA-NWM represents plausible futures with an uncertainty subspace and decomposes the prediction--goal discrepancy into uncertainty-explainable and unexplainable components. Only the unexplainable residual is used for scoring, enabling robust selection without multiple future samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UA-NWM consistently outperforms existing navigation world models while maintaining low inference latency. Real-world UAV experiments further validate its practical applicability. Project page: https://duryi.github.io/UA-NWM-Project-Page

Video world models must preserve the visual state of the world over time, but existing evaluation protocols often rely on generated histories, video reference, or selected revisit viewpoints that can confound the assessment of a model's true memory capability. To address this, we introduce OPIS, an input-grounded benchmark that strictly anchors the assessment to a fixed set of object instances from the initial observation for evaluating multi-object memory in video world models. The OPIS dataset comprises 500 cases across real-world, embodied-robotic, and game-world domains, providing dense object-level annotations for 12,672 rigid, articulated, and deformable instances. Our object-centric evaluator combines association and explicit visibility reasoning to hierarchically measure Object (O) Presence (P), Identity (I), and Structure (S), utilizing static or dynamic evaluation tracks based on object kinematics. Across eight image-to-video or camera-conditioned world models, our proposed OPIS scores range from 48.65 to 56.01. As the reference inventory grows from less than 20 to more than 40 objects, the Presence, Identity, and Structure scores show an overall decline, with the average Identity score falling from 40.22 to 23.11. The results demonstrate that preserving the particular object instances in the input is considerably harder than generating plausible visual elements.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved notable progress in end-to-end autonomous driving by integrating perception, reasoning, and control within a unified multimodal framework. However, they often lack explicit modeling of temporal dynamics and global world consistency, which limits their foresight and safety. In contrast, world models can simulate plausible future scenes but generally struggle to reason about or evaluate the imagined future they generate. In this work, we present VLA-World, a simple yet effective VLA world model that unifies predictive imagination with reflective reasoning to improve driving foresight. VLA-World first uses an action-derived feasible trajectory to guide the generation of the next-frame image, capturing rich spatial and temporal cues that describe how the surrounding environment evolves. The model then reasons over this self-generated future imagined frame to refine the predicted trajectory, achieving higher performance and better interpretability. To support this pipeline, we curate nuScenes-GR-20K, a generative reasoning dataset derived from nuScenes, and employ a three-stage training strategy that includes pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLA-World consistently surpasses state-of-the-art VLA and world-model baselines on both planning and future-generation benchmarks. Project page: https://vlaworld.github.io

We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.

We introduce Image-GOal Representations (IGOR), aiming to learn a unified, semantically consistent action space across human and various robots. Through this unified latent action space, IGOR enables knowledge transfer among large-scale robot and human activity data. We achieve this by compressing visual changes between an initial image and its goal state into latent actions. IGOR allows us to generate latent action labels for internet-scale video data. This unified latent action space enables the training of foundation policy and world models across a wide variety of tasks performed by both robots and humans. We demonstrate that: (1) IGOR learns a semantically consistent action space for both human and robots, characterizing various possible motions of objects representing the physical interaction knowledge; (2) IGOR can "migrate" the movements of the object in the one video to other videos, even across human and robots, by jointly using the latent action model and world model; (3) IGOR can learn to align latent actions with natural language through the foundation policy model, and integrate latent actions with a low-level policy model to achieve effective robot control. We believe IGOR opens new possibilities for human-to-robot knowledge transfer and control.

We present an approach to model-based RL that achieves a new state of the art performance on the challenging Craftax-classic benchmark, an open-world 2D survival game that requires agents to exhibit a wide range of general abilities -- such as strong generalization, deep exploration, and long-term reasoning. With a series of careful design choices aimed at improving sample efficiency, our MBRL algorithm achieves a reward of 67.4% after only 1M environment steps, significantly outperforming DreamerV3, which achieves 53.2%, and, for the first time, exceeds human performance of 65.0%. Our method starts by constructing a SOTA model-free baseline, using a novel policy architecture that combines CNNs and RNNs. We then add three improvements to the standard MBRL setup: (a) "Dyna with warmup", which trains the policy on real and imaginary data, (b) "nearest neighbor tokenizer" on image patches, which improves the scheme to create the transformer world model (TWM) inputs, and (c) "block teacher forcing", which allows the TWM to reason jointly about the future tokens of the next timestep.

We introduce Latent Particle World Model (LPWM), a self-supervised object-centric world model scaled to real-world multi-object datasets and applicable in decision-making. LPWM autonomously discovers keypoints, bounding boxes, and object masks directly from video data, enabling it to learn rich scene decompositions without supervision. Our architecture is trained end-to-end purely from videos and supports flexible conditioning on actions, language, and image goals. LPWM models stochastic particle dynamics via a novel latent action module and achieves state-of-the-art results on diverse real-world and synthetic datasets. Beyond stochastic video modeling, LPWM is readily applicable to decision-making, including goal-conditioned imitation learning, as we demonstrate in the paper. Code, data, pre-trained models and video rollouts are available: https://taldatech.github.io/lpwm-web

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI -- effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 https://openmdw.ai/license/1-1/ License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos}{github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3 . The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3 .

Different research lines use the term world model in different ways, yet they share a common aim: to capture how the world evolves under action in a form that supports perception, simulation, and planning. Two prominent realizations are neural predictors that learn dynamics in continuous vector spaces, and hand-built physics engines that expose explicit state and physical laws. Neural predictors scale from data but leave the form of the dynamics implicit; physics engines are inspectable and editable but difficult to construct at scale. We introduce VisualPatchWorld (VPW), which represents world dynamics as code. VPW first selects a qualitative dynamical form with short active probes, then fits that form's free parameters from recorded state-action traces by minimizing multi-step prediction error. The resulting programs can be rolled forward like a simulator, inspected in source form, and used inside model-predictive control; image-derived scene graphs can supply the live state at replan time. Across comparisons with prior code-based world models, VPW attains 69.0% mean planning success and exceeds the strongest code baseline by 23.5 points. The largest gains arise when choosing the correct qualitative dynamics is essential. Under the same planner, the induced models approach ground-truth engine success on navigation and grasp-rich control; a residual gap remains for contact-rich pushing, and checking a shortlist of promising plans in the engine closes most of that gap. These results establish a practical route toward automatically constructed code world models that are useful for planning. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/VisualPatchWorld/.

Visual prediction has emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control, where future observations are generated and then translated into actions. However, dense video generation is computationally expensive and often unnecessary for many manipulation tasks, whose progress can be summarized by a small number of task-relevant visual states. In this work, we study whether image editing models can serve as sparse visual world models for robot manipulation by predicting task-level future states without dense video rollout. We first conduct a controlled comparison between the video generation model Wan2.2 and the image editing model FLUX-Kontext under the same robotic data setting, and find that image editing produces more reliable task-level keyframes with better visual fidelity and substantially lower inference cost. Motivated by this observation, we propose SWEET, a one-shot sparse visual planning framework that progressively generates a sequence of task-relevant manipulation keyframes through successive image editing, conditioned on language instructions and optional arrow-based spatial guidance. A goal-conditioned diffusion action predictor then converts adjacent imagined keyframes into executable action chunks. To reduce the mismatch between real and edited visual subgoals, we further introduce a mixed-training strategy with filtered edited targets. Experiments on DROID and RoboMimic show that SWEET improves keyframe prediction across seen and unseen scenes and enables a full pipeline from sequential keyframe planning to executable robot actions, suggesting that image editing is a promising and underexplored direction for embodied visual prediction.

Precise control over camera and object motion is essential for professional video production. Existing methods control objects only coarsely, through image-plane cues that are ambiguous in depth and rotation or through 3D tracks and blobs that lack complete geometry and lose consistency across viewpoint changes. We introduce 4Director, a video world model conditioned on an explicit 4D scene representation: each object is reconstructed once from the input image as a canonical mesh and moved by one prescribed rigid transformation per frame. This representation provides an intuitive 3D control interface and prevents unobserved geometry from being regenerated independently in every frame. We render the controlled scene as a depth video and introduce a Motion Adapter that transforms this geometric scaffold into video while synthesizing view-consistent appearance, illumination, and non-rigid dynamics. For training, we construct RealCOD-Rigid, a new dataset of 20,774 clips annotated with rigid 3D scenes by our automatic pipeline. We further introduce Identity-Gated IoU (IG-IoU), which jointly evaluates adherence to prescribed object motion and preservation of object identity. Experiments demonstrate that 4Director consistently outperforms prior methods in visual quality and in camera and object control.

Streaming world models should render a place consistently across repeated visits. Directly supervising such revisits requires training samples that capture both visits, often spanning minutes. Yet dense attention over the full span incurs quadratic costs, making long-span supervision expensive. Memorizon breaks this coupling: long spans are needed for supervision, but not for attention, since the two visits can share a forward pass without including every intervening frame. A training sample covers a span of any length but is scored only on its last k chunks. Instead of tokenizing the history before them, each scored chunk retrieves its own top-K latents by camera co-visibility, and the union of these requests forms a shared bank. The bank is bounded by kK, so the sequence stays bounded however long the span; at the shortest span the recipe is exactly conventional training. Adding the bank raises the cost of a step once; beyond that, a longer span costs little, and going from 100 to 400 s adds 12% to the step time. Against a sliding-window baseline, retrieval raises revisit consistency on every split, and a span long enough to reach the first visit of each return adds a further 24% to 30%, at some cost in image quality; beyond that span, more length no longer helps. Filling the bank from another episode lowers revisit correlation by 83%, so the model uses what it retrieves. Project page: https://tingtingliao.github.io/memorizon

World models enable agents to plan by predicting future states of the environment, but their predictions can become unreliable when test-time dynamics differ from those seen during training. We present JEPA-TTT, which adapts the latent dynamics predictor of a pretrained action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture world model throughout test time. Self-supervised updates accumulate across episodes, while the visual encoder and reward head remain fixed, preserving the pretrained representation and task objective. Planning requires neither a goal image nor online environment reward. JEPA-TTT uses dense replay, which forms prediction windows at every temporal offset, retains them in a growing buffer, and samples minibatches from that buffer for predictor updates. Across eight dynamics shifts in four continuous-control environments, JEPA-TTT improves planning on every shift. After 500 test-time episodes, it reduces autoregressive latent prediction error by 83% on average and improves planning performance by 153% over the frozen JEPA world model. These results show that persistent self-supervised test-time training can adapt a pretrained latent world model under changed dynamics.

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.

Autonomous driving world models are expected to work effectively across three core dimensions: state, action, and reward. Existing models, however, are typically restricted to limited state modalities, short video sequences, imprecise action control, and a lack of reward awareness. In this paper, we introduce OmniNWM, an omniscient panoramic navigation world model that addresses all three dimensions within a unified framework. For state, OmniNWM jointly generates panoramic videos of RGB, semantics, metric depth, and 3D occupancy. A flexible forcing strategy enables high-quality long-horizon auto-regressive generation. For action, we introduce a normalized panoramic Plucker ray-map representation that encodes input trajectories into pixel-level signals, enabling highly precise and generalizable control over panoramic video generation. Regarding reward, we move beyond learning reward functions with external image-based models: instead, we leverage the generated 3D occupancy to directly define rule-based dense rewards for driving compliance and safety. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniNWM achieves state-of-the-art performance in video generation, control accuracy, and long-horizon stability, while providing a reliable closed-loop evaluation framework through occupancy-grounded rewards. Project page is available at https://github.com/Arlo0o/OmniNWM.

Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to down-stream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesize new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

Video world models approximate the stochastic distribution of physical outcomes through generative sampling, but existing benchmarks score individual generations or compare distributions coarsely over a whole dataset, leaving the fine-grained aleatoric uncertainty of specific phenomena untested. We introduce CaliBench, which scores outcomes in a physically interpretable discrete space - a bin index, a die face, a suit, a colour - rather than a learned feature space such as in FID, so the distance from a known reference distribution is measured directly. We curate outcome spaces whose reference is known in closed form (binomial Galton boards, Bernoulli forks, uniform dice/cards/lottery, a skewed European-roulette colour), enabling an exact calibration test. We decompose performance into two orthogonal axes that a single accuracy metric conflates: scorability, the fraction of generations yielding a scoreable outcome, and calibration, the total variation distance from the reference on that sample. A chi-squared test assesses significance; as calibration is its null hypothesis it can evidence only miscalibration, and at N=32 per cell detects only large deviations. We apply it to nine scenes and six image-to-video models (WAN-2.7, SeeDance-2.0, HappyHorse-1.0, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen-4.5, Cosmos3-Super), 32 generations each. Models consistently concentrate probability mass on a few outcomes rather than reproducing the reference. Most scene-model combinations are significantly miscalibrated, in the extreme collapsing to one outcome, as Veo 3.1 does on dice. On roulette, generations often leave the ball ambiguously placed, giving several models low scorability. Performance varies by scene: no model dominates all nine. We release the protocol and a metric (mean normalised total variation, mnTV) for comparing new models against our results.

Current world models for explicit world simulation typically follow two distinct pathways: (1) video generative models (e.g., Sora), which simulate realistic appearances but fail to preserve 3D consistency; and (2) 3D generative models (e.g., Marble), which generate geometrically consistent scenes but often yield static, less realistic observations. We present AEON, a unified framework that bridges video-based and 3D-based world models and combines the benefits of both. The key insight of AEON lies in a generative model that operates within the text- or image-conditioned video latent space while producing renderable 4D graphics primitives---specifically, 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS)---as the explicit world representation. We train a 4D reconstruction model to predict both 4DGS and camera poses from monocular videos, serving as our initialized 4D decoder. Furthermore, we design a domain adapter that translates generative video latents into reconstructive 4D latents through a distillation process on the video VAE. AEON naturally supports video-based world modeling by rendering 4DGS at predicted camera trajectories, and constructs a persistent 4D environment with scene dynamics for realistic world simulation. Consequently, AEON empowers a diverse range of world modeling applications and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks. Project Page: https://weiqi-zhang.github.io/AEON

Unsupervised pre-training methods utilizing large and diverse datasets have achieved tremendous success across a range of domains. Recent work has investigated such unsupervised pre-training methods for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) but is limited to domain-specific or simulated data. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-training world models with abundant in-the-wild videos for efficient learning of downstream visual control tasks. However, in-the-wild videos are complicated with various contextual factors, such as intricate backgrounds and textured appearance, which precludes a world model from extracting shared world knowledge to generalize better. To tackle this issue, we introduce Contextualized World Models (ContextWM) that explicitly model both the context and dynamics to overcome the complexity and diversity of in-the-wild videos and facilitate knowledge transfer between distinct scenes. Specifically, a contextualized extension of the latent dynamics model is elaborately realized by incorporating a context encoder to retain contextual information and empower the image decoder, which allows the latent dynamics model to concentrate on essential temporal variations. Our experiments show that in-the-wild video pre-training equipped with ContextWM can significantly improve the sample-efficiency of MBRL in various domains, including robotic manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous driving.

We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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/.

General-purpose control demands agents that act across many tasks and embodiments, yet research on reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control remains dominated by single-task or offline regimes, reinforcing a view that online RL does not scale. Inspired by the foundation model recipe (large-scale pretraining followed by light RL) we ask whether a single agent can be trained on hundreds of tasks with online interaction. To accelerate research in this direction, we introduce a new benchmark with 200 diverse tasks spanning many domains and embodiments, each with language instructions, demonstrations, and optionally image observations. We then present Newt, a language-conditioned multitask world model that is first pretrained on demonstrations to acquire task-aware representations and action priors, and then jointly optimized with online interaction across all tasks. Experiments show that Newt yields better multitask performance and data-efficiency than a set of strong baselines, exhibits strong open-loop control, and enables rapid adaptation to unseen tasks. We release our environments, demonstrations, code for training and evaluation, as well as 200+ checkpoints.

World models require robust relational understanding to support prediction, reasoning, and control. While object-centric representations provide a useful abstraction, they are not sufficient to capture interaction-dependent dynamics. We therefore propose C-JEPA, a simple and flexible object-centric world model that extends masked joint embedding prediction from image patches to object-centric representations. By applying object-level masking that requires an object's state to be inferred from other objects, C-JEPA induces latent interventions with counterfactual-like effects and prevents shortcut solutions, making interaction reasoning essential. Empirically, C-JEPA leads to consistent gains in visual question answering, with an absolute improvement of about 20\% in counterfactual reasoning compared to the same architecture without object-level masking. On agent control tasks, C-JEPA enables substantially more efficient planning by using only 1\% of the total latent input features required by patch-based world models, while achieving comparable performance. Finally, we provide a formal analysis demonstrating that object-level masking induces a causal inductive bias via latent interventions. Our code is available at https://github.com/galilai-group/cjepa.

Video world models are increasingly used in robotic manipulation, yet existing benchmarks mostly evaluate them under valid, feasible, and safe instructions. We introduce RoboTrustBench, a benchmark for evaluating the trustworthiness of video world models under four scenarios: Normal, Constraint-Sensitive, Counterfactual, and Adversarial. Built from real-world DROID episodes, RoboTrustBench contains 1,207 expert-validated instruction-image pairs and a six-dimensional evaluation protocol with 13 fine-grained criteria. Evaluating seven representative video world models with human and MLLM assessment, we find that current models often generate visually coherent videos, but struggle with constraint reasoning, counterfactual grounding, physical interaction, and unsafe-instruction suppression. These results show that visual quality and surface-level instruction following are insufficient for trustworthy robotic video world modeling.

Robotic manipulation in the open world requires not only recognizing what a scene looks like, but also anticipating how its 3D structure moves under interaction. We argue that synchronized RGB, depth, and optical flow, namely RGB-DF, provide a physically grounded representation that captures the underlying 4D dynamics of a scene. Compared to 2D pixel videos, this multi-modal synergy aligns visual appearance with geometric structure and temporal motion, creating a representation space significantly closer to the low-level end-effector actions demanded by robotic systems, thereby narrowing the gap between world prediction and policy learning. Building on this insight, we introduce RynnWorld-4D, a generative model that co-produces future RGB frames, depth maps, and optical flow from a single RGB-D image and a language instruction within one unified diffusion process. This 4D world model features a tri-branch architecture that integrates cross-modal attention with frame-wise 3D RoPE, ensuring that appearance, geometry, and motion evolve consistently. To supply training data at scale, we curate Rynn4DDataset 1.0, a massive dataset of over 254.4 million frames across egocentric human and robotic manipulation videos with high-quality pseudo-labels for depth and optical flow. We further propose RynnWorld-4D-Policy, an inverse dynamics head that consumes the internal 4D representations of RynnWorld-4D in a single forward pass, bypassing expensive multi-step denoising, to output robot actions in a closed-loop manner. Experiments show that RynnWorld-4D produces temporally and spatially coherent 4D predictions, and that RynnWorld-4D-Policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world dexterous bimanual manipulation tasks, particularly excelling in tasks demanding spatial precision and temporal coordination.

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have shown promising world modeling capabilities, enabling planning in latent space by optimizing action trajectories using methods like the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM). These methods are, however, too computationally expensive and ineffective for long-horizon planning. Furthermore, these methods typically require an explicit image of the goal state, which is not always possible in real-world tasks. In this work, we tackle these limitations by proposing Forward-Forward-JEPA (FF-JEPA), a hierarchical approach leveraging two forward dynamics models. Alongside a standard action-conditioned forward model, we introduce an action-free latent planner that predicts the next subgoal given the current state. This approach removes the need for goal images and enables long-horizon planning by decomposing complex trajectories into a sequence of tractable, short-term optimization problems. Preliminary results on PushT demonstrate that FF-JEPA successfully overcomes flat world models' long-horizon collapse, highlighting this approach as a promising direction for goal-free planning.

World models offer a promising avenue for more faithfully capturing complex dynamics, including contacts and non-rigidity, as well as complex sensory information, such as visual perception, in situations where standard simulators struggle. However, these models are computationally complex to evaluate, posing a challenge for popular RL approaches that have been successfully used with simulators to solve complex locomotion tasks but yet struggle with manipulation. This paper introduces a method that bypasses simulators entirely, training RL policies inside world models learned from robots' interactions with real environments. At its core, our approach enables policy training with large-scale diffusion models via a novel decoupled first-order gradient (FoG) method: a full-scale world model generates accurate forward trajectories, while a lightweight latent-space surrogate approximates its local dynamics for efficient gradient computation. This coupling of a local and global world model ensures high-fidelity unrolling alongside computationally tractable differentiation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the Push-T manipulation task, where it significantly outperforms PPO in sample efficiency. We further evaluate our approach through an ego-centric object manipulation task with a quadruped. Together, these results demonstrate that learning inside data-driven world models is a promising pathway for solving hard-to-model RL tasks in image space without reliance on hand-crafted physics simulators.

Latent world models have shown a remarkable ability to predict future states and to plan in the real world. In practice, however, we lack a principled way to estimate how their capabilities scale with model size, data, and compute, an open problem that slows progress in the field. In this work we present RoboJEPA, a world model based on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and trained on a large-scale dataset spanning 12 robotic embodiments. We show that RoboJEPA's imagination error, the error of its latent rollouts, follows a second-order power law in compute, allowing us to predict model quality well beyond the scale at which the law is fit. We further show that downstream robotic planning performance improves predictably with compute, and that imagination error is strongly correlated with it, making it a reliable proxy for real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate that latent world models can be deployed zero-shot as robotic agents, planning toward a single goal image to solve tasks requiring long-horizon planning on real hardware. We release all model checkpoints together with our training and robot deployment code. To our knowledge, this is the first work to establish scaling laws for multi-embodiment robotic world models trained on real robot data, and RoboJEPA, at 8B parameters, is the largest JEPA predictor model trained to date.

Despite the success of video world models, extending them to multiple agents is difficult because it requires generating several agent-specific video streams that are consistent in time and between agents. To address this gap, we introduce OverSeer, a multi-agent world model that augments egocentric agent views with auxiliary camera views. We suggest that, by fixing the auxiliary views in space, they act as a proxy for a world-centric representation: Unlike the agents' views, which can change entirely due to a simple change in agent position, changes in the auxiliary views directly map to localized changes in the world state. We show that these fixed views substantially help the model to maintain consistency. We also show that, due to their redundant and semi-static nature, the auxiliary views can be efficiently compressed with a delta-VAE that encodes only the changes relative to a static reference image, reducing the number of tokens required to process them. Experiments in Minecraft and Doom demonstrate improved world and agent consistency, with qualitative results on real-world multi-camera captures indicating that the approach is not tied to game engines. Our compression analysis further shows that delta-VAE substantially reduces the computational overhead of auxiliary-view generation. We conclude that these fixed views provide a simple and efficient way to improve multi-agent world models.

Achieving physically accurate object manipulation in image editing is essential for its potential applications in interactive world models. However, existing visual generative models often fail at precise spatial manipulation, resulting in incorrect scaling and positioning of objects. This limitation primarily stems from the lack of explicit mechanisms to incorporate 3D geometry and perspective projection. To achieve accurate manipulation, we develop PhyEdit, an image editing framework that leverages explicit geometric simulation as contextual 3D-aware visual guidance. By combining this plug-and-play 3D prior with joint 2D--3D supervision, our method effectively improves physical accuracy and manipulation consistency. To support this method and evaluate performance, we present a real-world dataset, RealManip-10K, for 3D-aware object manipulation featuring paired images and depth annotations. We also propose ManipEval, a benchmark with multi-dimensional metrics to evaluate 3D spatial control and geometric consistency. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods, including strong closed-source models, in both 3D geometric accuracy and manipulation consistency.

State-of-the-art video generative models produce promising visual content yet often violate basic physics principles, limiting their utility. While some attribute this deficiency to insufficient physics understanding from pre-training, we find that the shortfall in physics plausibility also stems from suboptimal inference strategies. We therefore introduce WMReward and treat improving physics plausibility of video generation as an inference-time alignment problem. In particular, we leverage the strong physics prior of a latent world model (here, VJEPA-2) as a reward to search and steer multiple candidate denoising trajectories, enabling scaling test-time compute for better generation performance. Empirically, our approach substantially improves physics plausibility across image-conditioned, multiframe-conditioned, and text-conditioned generation settings, with validation from human preference study. Notably, in the ICCV 2025 Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge, we achieve a final score of 62.64%, winning first place and outperforming the previous state of the art by 7.42%. Our work demonstrates the viability of using latent world models to improve physics plausibility of video generation, beyond this specific instantiation or parameterization.

We present Echo-Memory, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models. These models generate multi-segment videos from a first frame, text prompt, and camera-action sequence, but their central failure is often memory rather than local image synthesis: after the camera leaves and returns, the scene or salient object may silently change. Existing memory designs are hard to compare because gains are entangled with backbone, training, retrieval, and evaluation differences. Echo-Memory fixes the action-to-video interface and varies only how history is stored and read by the generator. Under a shared video diffusion backbone, optimizer, camera-action representation, sampler, and evaluation pipeline, we compare raw context, compression-based memory, spatial summaries with different read-out paths, and state-space recurrence. This matched matrix separates four otherwise conflated axes: capacity, compression, read-out, and recurrence. We also evaluate memory through a three-branch protocol: replay quality, in-domain loop revisit, and open-domain return probes. The branches routinely disagree, showing that replay fidelity is not a sufficient proxy for remembering a world. Three findings follow. Raw context is a strong capacity baseline and improves open-domain return far more than it improves replay metrics. Compactness is not a free substitute for capacity: aggressive spatial and hybrid-compression memories lose the salient evidence needed for return. Finally, block-wise state-space recurrence is the strongest open-domain return mechanism in our matrix, showing that the structure of implicit memory matters as much as the decision to use it. These results provide a compact protocol for studying memory in action world models beyond isolated replay metrics.

Embodied world models have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for visual robotic decision-making and interactive environment simulation. However, conventional embodied frameworks rely on low-dimensional structured action vectors (e.g., joint angles and end-effector poses), which suffer from limited expressive capacity, poor generalization across diverse embodiments, and unnatural dynamic modeling for complex physical interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposesiMac (Image as Action Control), a novel unified control paradigm that treats raw visual images as native action representations for embodied world models. Departing from traditional explicit kinematic action encoding, iMac formulates continuous visual manipulation as image-based action tokens, which inherently encapsulate spatial motion intentions, interactive geometric constraints and subtle physical dynamics. We construct a dual-branch embodied architecture consisting of an image-action encoder and a dynamic world predictor: the encoder compresses target-driven visual images into compact action embeddings, while the predictor learns environment transition rules conditioned on image actions to achieve high-fidelity future state prediction and closed-loop embodied control. Extensive experiments are conducted on public embodied manipulation benchmarks and real-world robotic scenarios. The results demonstrate that iMac outperforms vector-based action control baselines in prediction accuracy, task success rate and cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, our image-action design eliminates the reliance on manually defined action spaces, realizing flexible and universal control for heterogeneous embodied agents. This work provides an innovative visual-action perspective for embodied world models, offering a simple yet effective paradigm for scalable robotic perception and manipulation.

Latent action world models let agents plan new behaviors at test time by predicting how actions change the environment, and joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) do so by forecasting future latent states rather than pixels. Yet nearly all such models see the world through a camera, even though robotic manipulation is fundamentally geometric: in robotics goals for manipulation are traditionally specified by target object poses, not by images of the object once placed. We ask whether latent planning survives a shift from appearance to geometry, on the observation side as well as on the goal specifications side. To answer this, we extend the stable-worldmodel evaluation platform with simulated LiDAR-style raycast point clouds as a new sensor modality, and adapt three JEPA designs to point clouds: a frozen-encoder model built on Utonia features, a distribution-prior model based on LeWM, and an action-sensitive model based on Delta-JEPA. We further introduce a goal-encoding mechanism that constructs the goal latent from the current latent and a 3D target pose, removing the need for goal images or goal point clouds. A comparative evaluation of the different anti-collapse mechanisms shows that point-cloud world models can match their image-based counterparts, demonstrating that the modality shift from appearance to geometry is achievable. All models are released as open weights with open-source training and inference code, to make world-model planning accessible for LiDAR-driven and pose-directed robotic tasks.

World Models (WMs) can support Multimodal Agents (MAs) through simulated experience, while Agent trajectories can inform World Model refinement. Evaluating this interaction requires separate evidence about action selection and state evolution. We introduce Dual Exam, which tests Agents under fixed environment response mechanisms and World Models under fixed action interventions across physical, digital, social, and scientific domains. The Agent track compares 10 configurations on 1,088 items in 15 reporting categories. The World Model track contains 400 cases across eight scenarios; 15 configurations have full coverage and one covers six scenarios. GPT 6 Astra leads the case-weighted Agent Index at 31.3, and GPT-Image-2 leads the full-coverage WM Overall at 21.7. These scores use different tasks and metrics and are not directly comparable. A 150-case pilot of one coupled pairing records zero task successes and motivates component-level diagnosis. Results reveal uneven task performance and failures to preserve task-relevant state. Their value for predicting coupled success or sustained reciprocal learning remains to be established.

Current self-supervised algorithms commonly rely on transformations such as data augmentation and masking to learn visual representations. This is achieved by enforcing invariance or equivariance with respect to these transformations after encoding two views of an image. This dominant two-view paradigm often limits the flexibility of learned representations for downstream adaptation by creating performance trade-offs between high-level invariance-demanding tasks such as image classification and more fine-grained equivariance-related tasks. In this work, we proposes seq-JEPA, a world modeling framework that introduces architectural inductive biases into joint-embedding predictive architectures to resolve this trade-off. Without relying on dual equivariance predictors or loss terms, seq-JEPA simultaneously learns two architecturally segregated representations: one equivariant to specified transformations and another invariant to them. To do so, our model processes short sequences of different views (observations) of inputs. Each encoded view is concatenated with an embedding of the relative transformation (action) that produces the next observation in the sequence. These view-action pairs are passed through a transformer encoder that outputs an aggregate representation. A predictor head then conditions this aggregate representation on the upcoming action to predict the representation of the next observation. Empirically, seq-JEPA demonstrates strong performance on both equivariant and invariant benchmarks without sacrificing one for the other. Furthermore, it excels at tasks that inherently require aggregating a sequence of observations, such as path integration across actions and predictive learning across eye movements.

Camera-conditioned world models generate interactive videos in which commanded actions should induce the expected scene changes while appearance, geometry, and temporal dynamics remain coherent. Existing rewards assess these requirements separately: geometry-based rewards estimate trajectory execution but cannot judge the visual quality of the executed motion, whereas image-based rewards measure frame quality without capturing action execution or temporal dynamics. We posit that a vision-language model (VLM) offers a shared reasoning space for relating actions to their visual outcomes. However, judging a complete long video against its full action sequence creates a lengthy, noisy context in which short-lived local action evidence can be missed or diluted. We present WorldReward, a VLM-based pairwise preference reward model that unifies action-consistency and visual-quality evaluation for camera-conditioned world models. WorldReward decomposes paired videos into action-aligned chunks, organizes each chunk into structured visual evidence, and aggregates chunk-level decisions by voting into separate video-level action and visual-quality preferences. To train it, we construct a large-scale reasoning-augmented preference dataset using structured judgments generated by a frontier VLM and refined through tool-based agent auditing and targeted human review. We further introduce WorldReward-Bench, a human-annotated benchmark measuring reward-model agreement with human preferences across action consistency, appearance quality, and motion quality. WorldReward achieves the highest agreement on all three dimensions, exceeding GPT-5.5 by 3.42, 1.45, and 3.56 percentage points, respectively. When used for RL post-training of HY-WorldPlay 1.5, it consistently improves both action execution and visual quality across short- to long-term horizons.

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.

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.

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in unified vision-language models handling both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture. While autoregressive VLMs can reason across modalities, they fail to generate high-quality images. In contrast, diffusion models produce photorealistic visuals yet struggle to generate coherent text, making it challenging to develop a single unified model that can seamlessly handle both visual and text generation. Recent advances suggest that language can be effectively embedded within visual representations, allowing models to reason about textual semantics directly from images. To this end, we propose UniCanvas, a first attempt that unifies diffusion models to generate interleaved multimodal contents through text-in-image generation. Diffusion models naturally capture transformations on a shared pixel canvas, which can be viewed as world models of visual change. Instead of producing discrete text tokens, the model learns to represent language as visual patterns inside images, leveraging its inherent multimodal embedding space. This design allows the model to "draw" text naturally within a single pixel canvas during image synthesis, achieving seamless multimodal generation. Experiments demonstrate that UniCanvas improves performance over previous unified models, positioning text-in-image generation with diffusion models as a promising unified multimodal generation paradigm.

Forecasting the evolution of 3D scenes and generating unseen scenarios via occupancy-based world models offers substantial potential for addressing corner cases in autonomous driving systems. While tokenization has revolutionized image and video generation, efficiently tokenizing complex 3D scenes remains a critical challenge for 3D world models. To address this, we propose I^{2}-World, an efficient framework for 4D occupancy forecasting. Our method decouples scene tokenization into intra-scene and inter-scene tokenizers. The intra-scene tokenizer employs a multi-scale residual quantization strategy to hierarchically compress 3D scenes while preserving spatial details. The inter-scene tokenizer residually aggregates temporal dependencies across timesteps. This dual design preserves the compactness of 3D tokenizers while retaining the dynamic expressiveness of 4D tokenizers. Unlike decoder-only GPT-style autoregressive models, I^{2}-World adopts an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder aggregates spatial context from the current scene and predicts a transformation matrix to enable high-level control over scene generation. The decoder, conditioned on this matrix and historical tokens, ensures temporal consistency during generation. Experiments demonstrate that I^{2}-World achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by 25.1\% in mIoU and 36.9\% in IoU for 4D occupancy forecasting while exhibiting exceptional computational efficiency: it requires merely 2.9 GB of training memory and achieves real-time inference at 37.0 FPS. Our code is available on https://github.com/lzzzzzm/II-World.

Data scaling plays a pivotal role in the pursuit of general intelligence. However, the prevailing perception-planning paradigm in autonomous driving relies heavily on expensive manual annotations to supervise trajectory planning, which severely limits its scalability. Conversely, although existing perception-free driving world models achieve impressive driving performance, their real-world reasoning ability for planning is solely built on next frame image forecasting. Due to the lack of enough supervision, these models often struggle with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in unsatisfactory trajectory planning. In this paper, we propose EponaV2, a novel paradigm of driving world models, which achieves high-quality planning with comprehensive future reasoning. Inspired by how human drivers anticipate 3D geometry and semantics, we train our model to forecast more comprehensive future representations, which can be additionally decoded to future geometry and semantic maps. Extracting the 3D and semantic modalities enables our model to deeply understand the surrounding environment, and the future prediction task significantly enhances the real-world reasoning capabilities of EponaV2, ultimately leading to improved trajectory planning. Moreover, inspired by the training recipe of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a flow matching group relative policy optimization mechanism to further improve planning accuracy. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances of EponaV2 among perception-free models on three NAVSIM benchmarks (+1.3PDMS, +5.5EPDMS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

World models enable a predictive substrate for planning and action, yet existing formulations merely answer a physical question: what/where it is, and how will it evolve. Human behavior, however, is driven by hidden mental state (what a person believes, wants, intends, feels, and considers socially permissible), so a model that tracks the physical scene but not what each agent knows and believes about it predicts the wrong action for the right-looking scene. We formulate Mental World Modeling (MWM), a generic theoretical framework that makes mental variables core components of a world model rather than posthoc rationales: MWM aintains a coupled physical-mental world state, renders a target-specific partial observation, and simulates how candidate actions jointly update both components. We instantiate the framework in MENTIS, a training-free and fully inspectable baseline that decomposes the process into state parsing, target-observation generation, action decomposition, coupled physical and mental transition, and branch-level value evaluation. On a manually constructed, quality-controlled dataset of situated decision scenarios spanning text, image, and sounding-video stories, experiments with 8 modern LLM-based world models demonstrate that explicitly modeling the mental state is essential for predicting human decisions. Deeper analyses further expose the bottlenecks of current mental world modeling. We expect MWM as a next stage of world modeling, from simulating physical scenes to simulating the minds that act in them.

Goal-conditioned visual navigation requires a robot to act under partial observability by anticipating how its motion will change the future egocentric view and whether that change brings it closer to the goal. Navigation world models provide such visual foresight, but they remain prediction modules that require an external planner to convert predicted futures into closed-loop control. We propose Navigation World Action Model (NavWAM), a diffusion-transformer policy that turns navigation world-model prediction into executable action by representing future observations, goal-progress values, and action chunks in a shared latent sequence. By learning future prediction jointly with the action and value targets that determine closed-loop behavior, NavWAM makes visual foresight directly usable for robot control. We build NavWAM through simulation pretraining and real-robot adaptation, and evaluate it on image-goal navigation against planning-based world models and a representative direct navigation policy. Across offline benchmarks and closed-loop real-robot deployment, NavWAM improves over planning-based world-model baselines in our evaluations while using the default policy mode without CEM-style action search. Project page: https://dachii-azm.github.io/navwam/

Efficient video tokenization remains a key bottleneck in learning general purpose vision models that are capable of processing long video sequences. Prevailing approaches are restricted to encoding videos to a fixed number of tokens, where too few tokens will result in overly lossy encodings, and too many tokens will result in prohibitively long sequence lengths. In this work, we introduce ElasticTok, a method that conditions on prior frames to adaptively encode a frame into a variable number of tokens. To enable this in a computationally scalable way, we propose a masking technique that drops a random number of tokens at the end of each frames's token encoding. During inference, ElasticTok can dynamically allocate tokens when needed -- more complex data can leverage more tokens, while simpler data only needs a few tokens. Our empirical evaluations on images and video demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in efficient token usage, paving the way for future development of more powerful multimodal models, world models, and agents.

With the growing adoption of vision-language-action models and world models in autonomous driving systems, scalable image tokenization becomes crucial as the interface for the visual modality. However, most existing tokenizers are designed for monocular and 2D scenes, leading to inefficiency and inter-view inconsistency when applied to high-resolution multi-view driving scenes. To address this, we propose DriveTok, an efficient 3D driving scene tokenizer for unified multi-view reconstruction and understanding. DriveTok first obtains semantically rich visual features from vision foundation models and then transforms them into the scene tokens with 3D deformable cross-attention. For decoding, we employ a multi-view transformer to reconstruct multi-view features from the scene tokens and use multiple heads to obtain RGB, depth, and semantic reconstructions. We also add a 3D head directly on the scene tokens for 3D semantic occupancy prediction for better spatial awareness. With the multiple training objectives, DriveTok learns unified scene tokens that integrate semantic, geometric, and textural information for efficient multi-view tokenization. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset demonstrate that the scene tokens from DriveTok perform well on image reconstruction, semantic segmentation, depth prediction, and 3D occupancy prediction tasks.

We consider the problem of forecasting motion from a single image, i.e., predicting how objects in the world are likely to move, without the ability to observe other parameters such as the object velocities or the forces applied to them. We formulate this task as conditional generation of dense trajectory grids with a model that closely follows the architecture of modern video generators but outputs motion trajectories instead of pixels. This approach captures scene-wide dynamics and uncertainty, yielding more accurate and diverse predictions than prior regressors and generators. We extensively evaluate our method on simulated data, demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream applications such as robotics, and show promising accuracy on real-world intuitive physics datasets. Although recent state-of-the-art video generators are often regarded as world models, we show that they struggle with forecasting motion from a single image, even in simple physical scenarios such as falling blocks or mechanical object interactions, despite fine-tuning on such data. We show that this limitation arises from the overhead of generating pixels rather than directly modeling motion.

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr^k, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EP_FID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID <= k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EP_FID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. Code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

Dealing with atypical traffic scenarios remains a challenging task in autonomous driving. However, most anomaly detection approaches cannot be trained on raw sensor data but require exposure to outlier data and powerful semantic segmentation models trained in a supervised fashion. This limits the representation of normality to labeled data, which does not scale well. In this work, we revisit unsupervised anomaly detection and present UMAD, leveraging generative world models and unsupervised image segmentation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection.

We present 4DNeX, the first feed-forward framework for generating 4D (i.e., dynamic 3D) scene representations from a single image. In contrast to existing methods that rely on computationally intensive optimization or require multi-frame video inputs, 4DNeX enables efficient, end-to-end image-to-4D generation by fine-tuning a pretrained video diffusion model. Specifically, 1) to alleviate the scarcity of 4D data, we construct 4DNeX-10M, a large-scale dataset with high-quality 4D annotations generated using advanced reconstruction approaches. 2) we introduce a unified 6D video representation that jointly models RGB and XYZ sequences, facilitating structured learning of both appearance and geometry. 3) we propose a set of simple yet effective adaptation strategies to repurpose pretrained video diffusion models for 4D modeling. 4DNeX produces high-quality dynamic point clouds that enable novel-view video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 4DNeX outperforms existing 4D generation methods in efficiency and generalizability, offering a scalable solution for image-to-4D modeling and laying the foundation for generative 4D world models that simulate dynamic scene evolution.

We present EB-JEPA, an open-source library for learning representations and world models using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs). JEPAs learn to predict in representation space rather than pixel space, avoiding the pitfalls of generative modeling while capturing semantically meaningful features suitable for downstream tasks. Our library provides modular, self-contained implementations that illustrate how representation learning techniques developed for image-level self-supervised learning can transfer to video, where temporal dynamics add complexity, and ultimately to action-conditioned world models, where the model must additionally learn to predict the effects of control inputs. Each example is designed for single-GPU training within a few hours, making energy-based self-supervised learning accessible for research and education. We provide ablations of JEA components on CIFAR-10. Probing these representations yields 91% accuracy, indicating that the model learns useful features. Extending to video, we include a multi-step prediction example on Moving MNIST that demonstrates how the same principles scale to temporal modeling. Finally, we show how these representations can drive action-conditioned world models, achieving a 97% planning success rate on the Two Rooms navigation task. Comprehensive ablations reveal the critical importance of each regularization component for preventing representation collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/eb_jepa.

Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, most existing approaches rely on large collections of robot demonstrations, which are costly to obtain and tightly coupled to specific embodiments. Human videos, by contrast, are abundant and capture rich interactions, providing diverse semantic and physical cues for real-world manipulation. Yet, embodiment differences and the frequent absence of task-aligned annotations make their direct use in VLA models challenging. This survey provides a unified view of how human videos are transformed into effective knowledge for VLA models. We categorize existing approaches into four classes based on the action-related information they derive: (i) latent action representations that encode inter-frame changes; (ii) predictive world models that forecast future frames; (iii) explicit 2D supervision that extracts image-plane cues; and (iv) explicit 3D reconstruction that recovers geometry or motion. Beyond this taxonomy, we highlight three key open challenges in this area: structuring unstructured videos into training-ready episodes, grounding video-derived supervision into robot-executable actions under embodiment and viewpoint heterogeneity, and designing evaluation protocols that better predict real-world deployment performance and transfer efficiency, thereby informing future research directions. A curated list of papers and resources is available at https://github.com/AaronFengZY/HumanCentricToVLA-Survey.

Traditional image classification requires a predefined list of semantic categories. In contrast, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can sidestep this requirement by classifying images directly using natural language (e.g., answering the prompt "What is the main object in the image?"). Despite this remarkable capability, most existing studies on LMM classification performance are surprisingly limited in scope, often assuming a closed-world setting with a predefined set of categories. In this work, we address this gap by thoroughly evaluating LMM classification performance in a truly open-world setting. We first formalize the task and introduce an evaluation protocol, defining various metrics to assess the alignment between predicted and ground truth classes. We then evaluate 13 models across 10 benchmarks, encompassing prototypical, non-prototypical, fine-grained, and very fine-grained classes, demonstrating the challenges LMMs face in this task. Further analyses based on the proposed metrics reveal the types of errors LMMs make, highlighting challenges related to granularity and fine-grained capabilities, showing how tailored prompting and reasoning can alleviate them.

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

Image restoration under real-world degradations is critical for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving and object detection. However, existing restoration models are often limited by the scale and distribution of their training data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. Recently, large-scale image editing models have shown strong generalization ability in restoration tasks, especially for closed-source models like Nano Banana Pro, which can restore images while preserving consistency. Nevertheless, achieving such performance with those large universal models requires substantial data and computational costs. To address this issue, we construct a large-scale dataset covering nine common real-world degradation types and train a state-of-the-art open-source model to narrow the gap with closed-source alternatives. Furthermore, we introduce RealIR-Bench, which contains 464 real-world degraded images and tailored evaluation metrics focusing on degradation removal and consistency preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model ranks first among open-source methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

By leveraging the generative priors from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, significant progress has been made in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, these methods tend to generate inaccurate and unnatural reconstructions in complex and/or heavily degraded scenes, primarily due to their limited perception and understanding capability of the input low-quality image. To address these limitations, we propose, for the first time to our knowledge, to adapt the pre-trained autoregressive multimodal model such as Lumina-mGPT into a robust Real-ISR model, namely PURE, which Perceives and Understands the input low-quality image, then REstores its high-quality counterpart. Specifically, we implement instruction tuning on Lumina-mGPT to perceive the image degradation level and the relationships between previously generated image tokens and the next token, understand the image content by generating image semantic descriptions, and consequently restore the image by generating high-quality image tokens autoregressively with the collected information. In addition, we reveal that the image token entropy reflects the image structure and present a entropy-based Top-k sampling strategy to optimize the local structure of the image during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that PURE preserves image content while generating realistic details, especially in complex scenes with multiple objects, showcasing the potential of autoregressive multimodal generative models for robust Real-ISR. The model and code will be available at https://github.com/nonwhy/PURE.

Recent diffusion model advancements have enabled high-fidelity images to be generated using text prompts. However, a domain gap exists between generated images and real-world images, which poses a challenge in generating high-quality variations of real-world images. Our investigation uncovers that this domain gap originates from a latents' distribution gap in different diffusion processes. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference pipeline called Real-world Image Variation by ALignment (RIVAL) that utilizes diffusion models to generate image variations from a single image exemplar. Our pipeline enhances the generation quality of image variations by aligning the image generation process to the source image's inversion chain. Specifically, we demonstrate that step-wise latent distribution alignment is essential for generating high-quality variations. To attain this, we design a cross-image self-attention injection for feature interaction and a step-wise distribution normalization to align the latent features. Incorporating these alignment processes into a diffusion model allows RIVAL to generate high-quality image variations without further parameter optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods with respect to semantic-condition similarity and perceptual quality. Furthermore, this generalized inference pipeline can be easily applied to other diffusion-based generation tasks, such as image-conditioned text-to-image generation and example-based image inpainting.

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs degraded by complex, unknown processes. While many Stable Diffusion (SD)-based Real-ISR methods have achieved remarkable success, their slow, multi-step inference hinders practical deployment. Recent SD-based one-step networks like OSEDiff and S3Diff alleviate this issue but still incur high computational costs due to their reliance on large pretrained SD models. This paper proposes a novel Real-ISR method, AdcSR, by distilling the one-step diffusion network OSEDiff into a streamlined diffusion-GAN model under our Adversarial Diffusion Compression (ADC) framework. We meticulously examine the modules of OSEDiff, categorizing them into two types: (1) Removable (VAE encoder, prompt extractor, text encoder, etc.) and (2) Prunable (denoising UNet and VAE decoder). Since direct removal and pruning can degrade the model's generation capability, we pretrain our pruned VAE decoder to restore its ability to decode images and employ adversarial distillation to compensate for performance loss. This ADC-based diffusion-GAN hybrid design effectively reduces complexity by 73% in inference time, 78% in computation, and 74% in parameters, while preserving the model's generation capability. Experiments manifest that our proposed AdcSR achieves competitive recovery quality on both synthetic and real-world datasets, offering up to 9.3times speedup over previous one-step diffusion-based methods. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Guaishou74851/AdcSR.

The introduction of generative models has significantly advanced image super-resolution (SR) in handling real-world degradations. However, they often incur fidelity-related issues, particularly distorting textual structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based SR framework, namely TADiSR, which integrates text-aware attention and joint segmentation decoders to recover not only natural details but also the structural fidelity of text regions in degraded real-world images. Moreover, we propose a complete pipeline for synthesizing high-quality images with fine-grained full-image text masks, combining realistic foreground text regions with detailed background content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances text legibility in super-resolved images, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization to real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/mingcv/TADiSR{here}.

Reconstructing editable Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models from images is essential for downstream modification, manufacturing, and design reuse. However, existing image-to-CAD methods are developed predominantly on synthetic renderings and face two coupled obstacles: a substantial appearance domain gap between synthetic and real images, and a previously overlooked parameter bias in widely used CAD data. We show that the local normalization adopted by DeepCAD concentrates several geometric parameters around a few discrete values while encoding substantial information in a single scale factor. Consequently, a model can achieve deceptively high parameter accuracy by exploiting these frequent values rather than inferring geometry from the input image. In this paper, we propose RealCAD, a unified framework that addresses these limitations at the representation, image, and feature levels. At the representation level, we redistribute scale information to the corresponding geometric parameters, producing less concentrated parameter distributions in a shared scale space. At the image level, geometry-constrained translation converts synthetic renderings toward the real-image domain while conditioning on object contours. At the feature level, a multi-positive contrastive objective aligns representations of the same CAD model across viewpoints and image domains, enabling CAD sequence prediction from each individual view. We further introduce OpenRealCAD, comprising four-view photographs of 392 3D-printed objects paired with ground-truth command sequences. Experiments show that the revised representation substantially reduces the accuracy attainable from parameter-frequency priors, making parameter accuracy a more reliable measure of image-conditioned geometric inference. RealCAD further improves real-domain command and parameter accuracy, while retaining competitive synthetic-domain performance.

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

What if a world simulation model could render not an imagined environment but a city that actually exists? Prior generative world models synthesize visually plausible yet artificial environments by imagining all content. We present Seoul World Model (SWM), a city-scale world model grounded in the real city of Seoul. SWM anchors autoregressive video generation through retrieval-augmented conditioning on nearby street-view images. However, this design introduces several challenges, including temporal misalignment between retrieved references and the dynamic target scene, limited trajectory diversity and data sparsity from vehicle-mounted captures at sparse intervals. We address these challenges through cross-temporal pairing, a large-scale synthetic dataset enabling diverse camera trajectories, and a view interpolation pipeline that synthesizes coherent training videos from sparse street-view images. We further introduce a Virtual Lookahead Sink to stabilize long-horizon generation by continuously re-grounding each chunk to a retrieved image at a future location. We evaluate SWM against recent video world models across three cities: Seoul, Busan, and Ann Arbor. SWM outperforms existing methods in generating spatially faithful, temporally consistent, long-horizon videos grounded in actual urban environments over trajectories reaching hundreds of meters, while supporting diverse camera movements and text-prompted scenario variations.

Aligning generative real-world image super-resolution models with human visual preference is challenging due to the perception--fidelity trade-off and diverse, unknown degradations. Prior approaches rely on offline preference optimization and static metric aggregation, which are often non-interpretable and prone to pseudo-diversity under strong conditioning. We propose OARS, a process-aware online alignment framework built on COMPASS, a MLLM-based reward that evaluates the LR to SR transition by jointly modeling fidelity preservation and perceptual gain with an input-quality-adaptive trade-off. To train COMPASS, we curate COMPASS-20K spanning synthetic and real degradations, and introduce a three-stage perceptual annotation pipeline that yields calibrated, fine-grained training labels. Guided by COMPASS, OARS performs progressive online alignment from cold-start flow matching to full-reference and finally reference-free RL via shallow LoRA optimization for on-policy exploration. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate consistent perceptual improvements while maintaining fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art performance on Real-ISR benchmarks.

While text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress, they struggle with real-world requests that are often underspecified, implicit, or dependent on up-to-date knowledge. We identify this challenge as the Context Gap: the mismatch between the user context and the sufficient generation context for T2I models. To bridge this gap, we propose Qwen-Image-Agent, a unified agentic framework that integrates plan, reason, search, memory and feedback in a context-centric manner. Qwen-Image-Agent treats user input as partial context and progressively constructs the generation context through Context-Aware Planning and Context Grounding. Specifically, Context-Aware Planning identifies missing context and plans how it should be acquired and used, while Context Grounding gathers this context from reason, search, memory, and feedback. To evaluate agentic image generation, we further introduce Image Agent Bench (IA-Bench), a benchmark covering four core image agent capabilities: Plan, Reason, Search, and Memory. Experiments on IA-Bench, Mindbench and WISE-Verified show that Qwen-Image-Agent outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Multimodal large models have shown excellent ability in addressing image super-resolution in real-world scenarios by leveraging language class as condition information, yet their abilities in degraded images remain limited. In this paper, we first revisit the capabilities of the Recognize Anything Model (RAM) for degraded images by calculating text similarity. We find that directly using contrastive learning to fine-tune RAM in the degraded space is difficult to achieve acceptable results. To address this issue, we employ a degradation selection strategy to propose a Real Embedding Extractor (REE), which achieves significant recognition performance gain on degraded image content through contrastive learning. Furthermore, we use a Conditional Feature Modulator (CFM) to incorporate the high-level information of REE for a powerful Mamba-based network, which can leverage effective pixel information to restore image textures and produce visually pleasing results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the REE can effectively help image super-resolution networks balance fidelity and perceptual quality, highlighting the great potential of Mamba in real-world applications. The source code of this work will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/nathan66666/DACESR.git

Latent diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-SR). However, existing methods consistently exhibit a persistent seesaw effect: enhancing perceptual realism compromises structural fidelity. This effect, we argue, is not intrinsic to diffusion models, but largely stems from the architectural constraints of prevailing two-stage frameworks. To address this challenge, we propose PixelSR, a novel single-stage Pixel Diffusion Transformer for Real-SR that operates directly in pixel space. Specifically, PixelSR consists of two core designs: Pixel-space Conditional Diffusion and Orthogonal Flow Decoupling. The former establishes an effective pixel-space restoration framework by integrating spatially aligned LR conditioning, visual semantic guidance, and lightweight texture refinement, thereby bypassing VAE compression and enabling end-to-end optimization directly in RGB space. Complementarily, the latter decomposes the asymmetric flow target into a low-rank semantic component and a noise-free orthogonal texture component. By routing these components to specialized branches, it achieves decoupled optimization with reduced mutual interference. Benefiting from these designs, our PixelSR restores perceptually realistic details while faithfully preserving structural content. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PixelSR not only achieves competitive performance, but also effectively mitigates the fidelity--realism seesaw effect.

Pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly applied to real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) task. Given the iterative refinement nature of diffusion models, most existing approaches are computationally expensive. While methods such as SinSR and OSEDiff have emerged to condense inference steps via distillation, their performance in image restoration or details recovery is not satisfied. To address this, we propose TSD-SR, a novel distillation framework specifically designed for real-world image super-resolution, aiming to construct an efficient and effective one-step model. We first introduce the Target Score Distillation, which leverages the priors of diffusion models and real image references to achieve more realistic image restoration. Secondly, we propose a Distribution-Aware Sampling Module to make detail-oriented gradients more readily accessible, addressing the challenge of recovering fine details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TSD-SR has superior restoration results (most of the metrics perform the best) and the fastest inference speed (e.g. 40 times faster than SeeSR) compared to the past Real-ISR approaches based on pre-trained diffusion priors.

Owe to the powerful generative priors, the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have become increasingly popular in solving the real-world image super-resolution problem. However, as a consequence of the heavy quality degradation of input low-resolution (LR) images, the destruction of local structures can lead to ambiguous image semantics. As a result, the content of reproduced high-resolution image may have semantic errors, deteriorating the super-resolution performance. To address this issue, we present a semantics-aware approach to better preserve the semantic fidelity of generative real-world image super-resolution. First, we train a degradation-aware prompt extractor, which can generate accurate soft and hard semantic prompts even under strong degradation. The hard semantic prompts refer to the image tags, aiming to enhance the local perception ability of the T2I model, while the soft semantic prompts compensate for the hard ones to provide additional representation information. These semantic prompts encourage the T2I model to generate detailed and semantically accurate results. Furthermore, during the inference process, we integrate the LR images into the initial sampling noise to mitigate the diffusion model's tendency to generate excessive random details. The experiments show that our method can reproduce more realistic image details and hold better the semantics. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/cswry/SeeSR.

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) focuses on recovering high-quality images from low-resolution inputs that suffer from complex degradations like noise, blur, and compression. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential in this area by leveraging strong generative priors to restore fine details. However, their iterative denoising process incurs high computational overhead, posing challenges for real-time applications. Although one-step distillation methods, such as OSEDiff and TSD-SR, offer faster inference, they remain fundamentally constrained by their large, over-parameterized model architectures. In this work, we present TinySR, a compact yet effective diffusion model specifically designed for Real-ISR that achieves real-time performance while maintaining perceptual quality. We introduce a Dynamic Inter-block Activation and an Expansion-Corrosion Strategy to facilitate more effective decision-making in depth pruning. We achieve VAE compression through channel pruning, attention removal and lightweight SepConv. We eliminate time- and prompt-related modules and perform pre-caching techniques to further speed up the model. TinySR significantly reduces computational cost and model size, achieving up to 5.68x speedup and 83% parameter reduction compared to its teacher TSD-SR, while still providing high quality results.

With the rapid advancement of image editing models and their widespread application across various domains, there is an increasingly urgent need to deploy these model capabilities directly into real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks remain confined to simple single-image tasks, suffering from limited coverage dimensions and an inability to effectively differentiate performance among diverse models. Consequently, they fail to reliably evaluate model performance in complex multi-image editing, highly demanding reasoning instructions, and practical deployment settings. To address these limitations, we propose CPI-Bench, a Comprehensive, Practical andIntelligent benchmark for real-world image editing. CPI-Bench comprises three core subsets: CPI-General-Bench, which comprehensively covers diverse editing tasks and pioneers the inclusion of multi-image editing evaluation; CPI-Practical-Bench, which focuses on high-frequency real-user application scenarios; and CPI-Intelligent-Bench, which is dedicated to evaluating capabilities in highly demanding reasoning-based editing. Evaluation results of mainstream image editing models based on CPI-Bench demonstrate that CPI-Bench enhances performance differentiation among models. It provides a comprehensive and reliable quantification of gaps in general editing capabilities, practical deployment efficacy, and advanced reasoning-based editing, offering invaluable guidance for the future optimization of image editing models. Crucially, our ranking analysis reveals that CPI-Bench achieves the highest alignment with the Arena Image Edit Leaderboard, indicating it faithfully captures the preferences and perceptual judgments of human evaluators, serving as a robust proxy for real-world user experience.

World-action models (WAMs) couple future visual-state prediction with action generation. By adapting video generators or image-editing models pretrained at scale, a prominent line of recent WAMs inherits both predictive knowledge and the models in which it was learned. We ask whether a predictive visual latent space induced by large-scale predictive pretraining can instead provide a sufficient foundation for effective WAM learning without inheriting a complete pretrained visual generative model. To answer this question, we introduce V-JEPA Policy, a simple framework that builds a WAM on the latent space of a frozen V-JEPA 2.1 encoder. An instruction-conditioned future-latent predictor and a flow-matching action expert are jointly learned from scratch in a single downstream stage, with the predictor's future-informed context key--value states conditioning action generation. With 0.9B total parameters, of which 0.6B are trainable, V-JEPA Policy achieves competitive performance with representative WAM and vision-language-action baselines across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboCasa-GR1. Comparing visual foundations under the same downstream framework and training budget identifies V-JEPA latents as more effective than the discriminative, reconstructive, and video-understanding-oriented alternatives, particularly under distribution shifts. Beyond task-specific learning, pretraining the predictor on DROID video--instruction pairs without action labels and adapting it into a WAM yields substantial gains in downstream control and out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these findings establish predictive visual latents as a foundation for effective WAM learning from task-specific demonstrations and for transferring future-modeling knowledge acquired from broader in-the-wild videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/breez3young/VJEPA-Policy.

We present a novel approach to leverage prior knowledge encapsulated in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for blind super-resolution (SR). Specifically, by employing our time-aware encoder, we can achieve promising restoration results without altering the pre-trained synthesis model, thereby preserving the generative prior and minimizing training cost. To remedy the loss of fidelity caused by the inherent stochasticity of diffusion models, we introduce a controllable feature wrapping module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by simply adjusting a scalar value during the inference process. Moreover, we develop a progressive aggregation sampling strategy to overcome the fixed-size constraints of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling adaptation to resolutions of any size. A comprehensive evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates its superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches.

Most recent real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods employ pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to synthesize the high-quality image either from random Gaussian noise, which yields realistic results but is slow due to iterative denoising, or directly from the input low-quality image, which is efficient but at the price of lower output quality. These approaches train ControlNet or LoRA modules while keeping the pre-trained model fixed, which often introduces over-enhanced artifacts and hallucinations, suffering from the robustness to inputs of varying degradations. Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models, such as pre-trained Infinity, can provide strong T2I generation capabilities while offering superior efficiency by using the bitwise next-scale prediction strategy. Building upon next-scale prediction, we introduce a robust Real-ISR framework, namely Next-Scale Autoregressive Modeling (NSARM). Specifically, we train NSARM in two stages: a transformation network is first trained to map the input low-quality image to preliminary scales, followed by an end-to-end full-model fine-tuning. Such a comprehensive fine-tuning enhances the robustness of NSARM in Real-ISR tasks without compromising its generative capability. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that as a pure AR model, NSARM achieves superior visual results over existing Real-ISR methods while maintaining a fast inference speed. Most importantly, it demonstrates much higher robustness to the quality of input images, showing stronger generalization performance. Project page: https://github.com/Xiangtaokong/NSARM

We introduce the largest real-world image deblurring dataset constructed from smartphone slow-motion videos. Using 240 frames captured over one second, we simulate realistic long-exposure blur by averaging frames to produce blurry images, while using the temporally centered frame as the sharp reference. Our dataset contains over 42,000 high-resolution blur-sharp image pairs, making it approximately 10 times larger than widely used datasets, with 8 times the amount of different scenes, including indoor and outdoor environments, with varying object and camera motions. We benchmark multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) deblurring models on our dataset and observe significant performance degradation, highlighting the complexity and diversity of our benchmark. Our dataset serves as a challenging new benchmark to facilitate robust and generalizable deblurring models.

Standard single-image super-resolution creates paired training data from high-resolution images through fixed downsampling kernels. However, real-world super-resolution (RWSR) faces unknown degradations in the low-resolution inputs, all the while lacking paired training data. Existing methods approach this problem by learning blind general models through complex synthetic augmentations on training inputs; they sacrifice the performance on specific degradation for broader generalization to many possible ones. We address the unsupervised RWSR for a targeted real-world degradation. We study from a distillation perspective and introduce a novel pairwise distance distillation framework. Through our framework, a model specialized in synthetic degradation adapts to target real-world degradations by distilling intra- and inter-model distances across the specialized model and an auxiliary generalized model. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances fidelity and perceptual quality, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in RWSR. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/PDD.

The pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models have been increasingly employed to tackle the real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) problem due to their powerful generative image priors. Most of the existing methods start from random noise to reconstruct the high-quality (HQ) image under the guidance of the given low-quality (LQ) image. While promising results have been achieved, such Real-ISR methods require multiple diffusion steps to reproduce the HQ image, increasing the computational cost. Meanwhile, the random noise introduces uncertainty in the output, which is unfriendly to image restoration tasks. To address these issues, we propose a one-step effective diffusion network, namely OSEDiff, for the Real-ISR problem. We argue that the LQ image contains rich information to restore its HQ counterpart, and hence the given LQ image can be directly taken as the starting point for diffusion, eliminating the uncertainty introduced by random noise sampling. We finetune the pre-trained diffusion network with trainable layers to adapt it to complex image degradations. To ensure that the one-step diffusion model could yield HQ Real-ISR output, we apply variational score distillation in the latent space to conduct KL-divergence regularization. As a result, our OSEDiff model can efficiently and effectively generate HQ images in just one diffusion step. Our experiments demonstrate that OSEDiff achieves comparable or even better Real-ISR results, in terms of both objective metrics and subjective evaluations, than previous diffusion model-based Real-ISR methods that require dozens or hundreds of steps. The source codes are released at https://github.com/cswry/OSEDiff.

Benefiting from pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods can synthesize rich and realistic details. However, due to the inherent stochasticity of T2I models, different noise inputs often lead to outputs with varying perceptual quality. Although this randomness is sometimes seen as a limitation, it also introduces a wider perceptual quality range, which can be exploited to improve Real-ISR performance. To this end, we introduce Direct Perceptual Preference Optimization for Real-ISR (DP^2O-SR), a framework that aligns generative models with perceptual preferences without requiring costly human annotations. We construct a hybrid reward signal by combining full-reference and no-reference image quality assessment (IQA) models trained on large-scale human preference datasets. This reward encourages both structural fidelity and natural appearance. To better utilize perceptual diversity, we move beyond the standard best-vs-worst selection and construct multiple preference pairs from outputs of the same model. Our analysis reveals that the optimal selection ratio depends on model capacity: smaller models benefit from broader coverage, while larger models respond better to stronger contrast in supervision. Furthermore, we propose hierarchical preference optimization, which adaptively weights training pairs based on intra-group reward gaps and inter-group diversity, enabling more efficient and stable learning. Extensive experiments across both diffusion- and flow-based T2I backbones demonstrate that DP^2O-SR significantly improves perceptual quality and generalizes well to real-world benchmarks.

Recent advancements in visual autoregressive models (VAR) have demonstrated their effectiveness in image generation, highlighting their potential for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, adapting VAR for ISR presents critical challenges. The next-scale prediction mechanism, constrained by causal attention, fails to fully exploit global low-quality (LQ) context, resulting in blurry and inconsistent high-quality (HQ) outputs. Additionally, error accumulation in the iterative prediction severely degrades coherence in ISR task. To address these issues, we propose VARestorer, a simple yet effective distillation framework that transforms a pre-trained text-to-image VAR model into a one-step ISR model. By leveraging distribution matching, our method eliminates the need for iterative refinement, significantly reducing error propagation and inference time. Furthermore, we introduce pyramid image conditioning with cross-scale attention, which enables bidirectional scale-wise interactions and fully utilizes the input image information while adapting to the autoregressive mechanism. This prevents later LQ tokens from being overlooked in the transformer. By fine-tuning only 1.2\% of the model parameters through parameter-efficient adapters, our method maintains the expressive power of the original VAR model while significantly enhancing efficiency. Extensive experiments show that VARestorer achieves state-of-the-art performance with 72.32 MUSIQ and 0.7669 CLIPIQA on DIV2K dataset, while accelerating inference by 10 times compared to conventional VAR inference.

Text-to-image (T2I) models can produce visually compelling images, yet they remain limited on open-world tasks that require complex semantic understanding, multi-step reasoning, and the integration of external world knowledge. Existing efforts introduce agent capabilities into image generation, but they either prescribe a fixed workflow or place only a subset of the open-world image generation process under agent control. Consequently, reasoning, tool invocation, and image generation are not coordinated by a single policy. We propose ToolArtist, a fully agentic image generation model obtained by post-training a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM). ToolArtist dynamically orchestrates reasoning, external tool use, and native image generation within one unified policy. During Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we equip a teacher agent with search tools alongside an image-generation tool. We then convert the collected trajectories into a UMM compatible format, where the image-generation tool is concealed while the resulting generated images are retained. During Reinforcement Learning (RL), we develop an agentic RL infrastructure for UMMs and introduce Reason-Act-Draw GRPO (RAD-GRPO), which uses complementary intent and quality rewards to jointly optimize the model. Experiments show that placing the entire open-world image-generation process under an agent policy consistently outperforms approaches with fixed pipelines or only partially agent-controlled components. We release the training data and the complete post-training infrastructure.

Real-world image restoration aims to restore high-quality (HQ) images from degraded low-quality (LQ) inputs captured under uncontrolled conditions. Existing methods typically depend on ground-truth (GT) supervision, assuming that GT provides perfect reference quality. However, GT can still contain images with inconsistent perceptual fidelity, causing models to converge to the average quality level of the training data rather than achieving the highest perceptual quality attainable. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework, termed IQPIR, that introduces an Image Quality Prior (IQP)-extracted from pre-trained No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) models-to guide the restoration process toward perceptually optimal outputs explicitly. Our approach synergistically integrates IQP with a learned codebook prior through three key mechanisms: (1) a quality-conditioned Transformer, where NR-IQA-derived scores serve as conditioning signals to steer the predicted representation toward maximal perceptual quality. This design provides a plug-and-play enhancement compatible with existing restoration architectures without structural modification; and (2) a dual-branch codebook structure, which disentangles common and HQ-specific features, ensuring a comprehensive representation of both generic structural information and quality-sensitive attributes; and (3) a discrete representation-based quality optimization strategy, which mitigates over-optimization effects commonly observed in continuous latent spaces. Extensive experiments on real-world image restoration demonstrate that our method not only surpasses cutting-edge methods but also serves as a generalizable quality-guided enhancement strategy for existing methods. The code is available.

Real-world image super-resolution is a critical image processing task, where two key evaluation criteria are the fidelity to the original image and the visual realness of the generated results. Although existing methods based on diffusion models excel in visual realness by leveraging strong priors, they often struggle to achieve an effective balance between fidelity and realness. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that a linear combination of multiple models outperforms individual models, motivating us to harness the strengths of different models for a more effective trade-off. Based on this insight, we propose a distillation-based approach that leverages the geometric decomposition of both fidelity and realness, alongside the performance advantages of multiple teacher models, to strike a more balanced trade-off. Furthermore, we explore the controllability of this trade-off, enabling a flexible and adjustable super-resolution process, which we call CTSR (Controllable Trade-off Super-Resolution). Experiments conducted on several real-world image super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior performance across both fidelity and realness metrics.

Generating an image from a provided descriptive text is quite a challenging task because of the difficulty in incorporating perceptual information (object shapes, colors, and their interactions) along with providing high relevancy related to the provided text. Current methods first generate an initial low-resolution image, which typically has irregular object shapes, colors, and interaction between objects. This initial image is then improved by conditioning on the text. However, these methods mainly address the problem of using text representation efficiently in the refinement of the initially generated image, while the success of this refinement process depends heavily on the quality of the initially generated image, as pointed out in the DM-GAN paper. Hence, we propose a method to provide good initialized images by incorporating perceptual understanding in the discriminator module. We improve the perceptual information at the first stage itself, which results in significant improvement in the final generated image. In this paper, we have applied our approach to the novel StackGAN architecture. We then show that the perceptual information included in the initial image is improved while modeling image distribution at multiple stages. Finally, we generated realistic multi-colored images conditioned by text. These images have good quality along with containing improved basic perceptual information. More importantly, the proposed method can be integrated into the pipeline of other state-of-the-art text-based-image-generation models to generate initial low-resolution images. We also worked on improving the refinement process in StackGAN by augmenting the third stage of the generator-discriminator pair in the StackGAN architecture. Our experimental analysis and comparison with the state-of-the-art on a large but sparse dataset MS COCO further validate the usefulness of our proposed approach.

Most existing super-resolution methods and datasets have been developed to improve the image quality in well-lighted conditions. However, these methods do not work well in real-world low-light conditions as the images captured in such conditions lose most important information and contain significant unknown noises. To solve this problem, we propose a SRRIIE dataset with an efficient conditional diffusion probabilistic models-based method. The proposed dataset contains 4800 paired low-high quality images. To ensure that the dataset are able to model the real-world image degradation in low-illumination environments, we capture images using an ILDC camera and an optical zoom lens with exposure levels ranging from -6 EV to 0 EV and ISO levels ranging from 50 to 12800. We comprehensively evaluate with various reconstruction and perceptual metrics and demonstrate the practicabilities of the SRRIIE dataset for deep learning-based methods. We show that most existing methods are less effective in preserving the structures and sharpness of restored images from complicated noises. To overcome this problem, we revise the condition for Raw sensor data and propose a novel time-melding condition for diffusion probabilistic model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectivenesses of the proposed conditional diffusion probabilistic model on Raw sensor data. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/Yaofang-Liu/Super-Resolving

Real-image super-resolution (Real-ISR) seeks to recover HR images from LR inputs with mixed, unknown degradations. While diffusion models surpass GANs in perceptual quality, they under-reconstruct high-frequency (HF) details due to a low-frequency (LF) bias and a depth-wise "low-first, high-later" hierarchy. We introduce FRAMER, a plug-and-play training scheme that exploits diffusion priors without changing the backbone or inference. At each denoising step, the final-layer feature map teaches all intermediate layers. Teacher and student feature maps are decomposed into LF/HF bands via FFT masks to align supervision with the model's internal frequency hierarchy. For LF, an Intra Contrastive Loss (IntraCL) stabilizes globally shared structure. For HF, an Inter Contrastive Loss (InterCL) sharpens instance-specific details using random-layer and in-batch negatives. Two adaptive modulators, Frequency-based Adaptive Weight (FAW) and Frequency-based Alignment Modulation (FAM), reweight per-layer LF/HF signals and gate distillation by current similarity. Across U-Net and DiT backbones (e.g., Stable Diffusion 2, 3), FRAMER consistently improves PSNR/SSIM and perceptual metrics (LPIPS, NIQE, MANIQA, MUSIQ). Ablations validate the final-layer teacher and random-layer negatives.

Professionals working in technical domain typically hand-draw (on whiteboard, paper, etc.) technical diagrams (e.g., flowcharts, block diagrams, etc.) during discussions; however, if they want to edit these later, it needs to be drawn from scratch. Modern day VLMs have made tremendous progress in image understanding but they struggle when it comes to understanding technical diagrams. One way to overcome this problem is to fine-tune on real world hand-drawn images, but it is not practically possible to generate large number of such images. In this paper, we introduce a large synthetically generated corpus (reflective of real world images) for training VLMs and subsequently evaluate VLMs on a smaller corpus of hand-drawn images (with the help of humans). We introduce several new self-supervision tasks for training and perform extensive experiments with various baseline models and fine-tune Llama 3.2 11B-instruct model on synthetic images on these tasks to obtain LLama-VL-TUG, which significantly improves the ROUGE-L performance of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 2.14x and achieves the best all-round performance across all baseline models. On real-world images, human evaluation reveals that we achieve minimum compilation errors across all baselines in 7 out of 8 diagram types and improve the average F1 score of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 6.97x.

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/.

World action models (WAMs) have recently gained increasing attention as a framework for jointly modeling scene evolution and ego actions in autonomous driving. Most existing WAMs learn scene dynamics in pixel space by combining a video-generation backbone for future-observation prediction with an action head for ego-trajectory prediction. Pixels, however, provide only an indirect representation of these dynamics: they entangle geometry and motion with appearance, texture, and illumination, forcing the model to infer three-dimensional transformations from two-dimensional observations. We argue that geometry, represented by point clouds, offers a more natural state space for driving because it explicitly captures spatial structure and the rigid and non-rigid transformations that govern scene evolution while directly aligning with the space in which driving actions are executed. Building on this insight, we introduce GeoWAM, a visual geometry world action model for autonomous driving. Rather than predicting future images, GeoWAM is pretrained to forecast future scene geometry, yielding representations that jointly encode spatial structure and temporal evolution. A geometry-conditioned action head then leverages these learned geometric dynamics to predict future ego trajectories. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations show that visual geometry world modeling yields substantially stronger driving policies than image-based alternatives, establishing future-geometry prediction as an effective pretraining objective for autonomous driving.

The objective of image super-resolution is to generate clean and high-resolution images from degraded versions. Recent advancements in diffusion modeling have led to the emergence of various image super-resolution techniques that leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) models. Nevertheless, due to the prevalent severe degradation in low-resolution images and the inherent characteristics of diffusion models, achieving high-fidelity image restoration remains challenging. Existing methods often exhibit issues including semantic loss, artifacts, and the introduction of spurious content not present in the original image. To tackle this challenge, we propose Cascaded diffusion for Super-Resolution, CasSR , a novel method designed to produce highly detailed and realistic images. In particular, we develop a cascaded controllable diffusion model that aims to optimize the extraction of information from low-resolution images. This model generates a preliminary reference image to facilitate initial information extraction and degradation mitigation. Furthermore, we propose a multi-attention mechanism to enhance the T2I model's capability in maximizing the restoration of the original image content. Through a comprehensive blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we substantiate the efficacy and superiority of our approach.

Impressive results on real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) have been achieved by employing pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) models. However, one critical issue of such methods lies in their poor reconstruction of image fine structures, such as small characters and textures, due to the aggressive resolution reduction of the VAE (eg., 8times downsampling) in the SD model. One solution is to employ a VAE with a lower downsampling rate for diffusion; however, adapting its latent features with the pre-trained UNet while mitigating the increased computational cost poses new challenges. To address these issues, we propose a Transfer VAE Training (TVT) strategy to transfer the 8times downsampled VAE into a 4times one while adapting to the pre-trained UNet. Specifically, we first train a 4times decoder based on the output features of the original VAE encoder, then train a 4times encoder while keeping the newly trained decoder fixed. Such a TVT strategy aligns the new encoder-decoder pair with the original VAE latent space while enhancing image fine details. Additionally, we introduce a compact VAE and compute-efficient UNet by optimizing their network architectures, reducing the computational cost while capturing high-resolution fine-scale features. Experimental results demonstrate that our TVT method significantly improves fine-structure preservation, which is often compromised by other SD-based methods, while requiring fewer FLOPs than state-of-the-art one-step diffusion models. The official code can be found at https://github.com/Joyies/TVT.