new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Apr 15

Zero-Shot Visual Reasoning by Vision-Language Models: Benchmarking and Analysis

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive zero- and few-shot performance on real-world visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, alluding to their capabilities as visual reasoning engines. However, the benchmarks being used conflate "pure" visual reasoning with world knowledge, and also have questions that involve a limited number of reasoning steps. Thus, it remains unclear whether a VLM's apparent visual reasoning performance is due to its world knowledge, or due to actual visual reasoning capabilities. To clarify this ambiguity, we systematically benchmark and dissect the zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs through synthetic datasets that require minimal world knowledge, and allow for analysis over a broad range of reasoning steps. We focus on two novel aspects of zero-shot visual reasoning: i) evaluating the impact of conveying scene information as either visual embeddings or purely textual scene descriptions to the underlying large language model (LLM) of the VLM, and ii) comparing the effectiveness of chain-of-thought prompting to standard prompting for zero-shot visual reasoning. We find that the underlying LLMs, when provided textual scene descriptions, consistently perform better compared to being provided visual embeddings. In particular, 18% higher accuracy is achieved on the PTR dataset. We also find that CoT prompting performs marginally better than standard prompting only for the comparatively large GPT-3.5-Turbo (175B) model, and does worse for smaller-scale models. This suggests the emergence of CoT abilities for visual reasoning in LLMs at larger scales even when world knowledge is limited. Overall, we find limitations in the abilities of VLMs and LLMs for more complex visual reasoning, and highlight the important role that LLMs can play in visual reasoning.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2024

DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning

The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, have proven challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific solutions with online policy learning. We argue that the true potential of world models lies in their ability to reason and plan across diverse problems using only passive data. Concretely, we require world models to have the following three properties: 1) be trainable on offline, pre-collected trajectories, 2) support test-time behavior optimization, and 3) facilitate task-agnostic reasoning. To realize this, we present DINO World Model (DINO-WM), a new method to model visual dynamics without reconstructing the visual world. DINO-WM leverages spatial patch features pre-trained with DINOv2, enabling it to learn from offline behavioral trajectories by predicting future patch features. This design allows DINO-WM to achieve observational goals through action sequence optimization, facilitating task-agnostic behavior planning by treating desired goal patch features as prediction targets. We evaluate DINO-WM across various domains, including maze navigation, tabletop pushing, and particle manipulation. Our experiments demonstrate that DINO-WM can generate zero-shot behavioral solutions at test time without relying on expert demonstrations, reward modeling, or pre-learned inverse models. Notably, DINO-WM exhibits strong generalization capabilities compared to prior state-of-the-art work, adapting to diverse task families such as arbitrarily configured mazes, push manipulation with varied object shapes, and multi-particle scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 2

SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has demonstrated strong performance in object segmentation tasks but faces challenges in visual object tracking, particularly when managing crowded scenes with fast-moving or self-occluding objects. Furthermore, the fixed-window memory approach in the original model does not consider the quality of memories selected to condition the image features for the next frame, leading to error propagation in videos. This paper introduces SAMURAI, an enhanced adaptation of SAM 2 specifically designed for visual object tracking. By incorporating temporal motion cues with the proposed motion-aware memory selection mechanism, SAMURAI effectively predicts object motion and refines mask selection, achieving robust, accurate tracking without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. SAMURAI operates in real-time and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance across diverse benchmark datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize without fine-tuning. In evaluations, SAMURAI achieves significant improvements in success rate and precision over existing trackers, with a 7.1% AUC gain on LaSOT_{ext} and a 3.5% AO gain on GOT-10k. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods on LaSOT, underscoring its robustness in complex tracking scenarios and its potential for real-world applications in dynamic environments. Code and results are available at https://github.com/yangchris11/samurai.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024 3

How Far Are Surgeons from Surgical World Models? A Pilot Study on Zero-shot Surgical Video Generation with Expert Assessment

Foundation models in video generation are demonstrating remarkable capabilities as potential world models for simulating the physical world. However, their application in high-stakes domains like surgery, which demand deep, specialized causal knowledge rather than general physical rules, remains a critical unexplored gap. To systematically address this challenge, we present SurgVeo, the first expert-curated benchmark for video generation model evaluation in surgery, and the Surgical Plausibility Pyramid (SPP), a novel, four-tiered framework tailored to assess model outputs from basic appearance to complex surgical strategy. On the basis of the SurgVeo benchmark, we task the advanced Veo-3 model with a zero-shot prediction task on surgical clips from laparoscopic and neurosurgical procedures. A panel of four board-certified surgeons evaluates the generated videos according to the SPP. Our results reveal a distinct "plausibility gap": while Veo-3 achieves exceptional Visual Perceptual Plausibility, it fails critically at higher levels of the SPP, including Instrument Operation Plausibility, Environment Feedback Plausibility, and Surgical Intent Plausibility. This work provides the first quantitative evidence of the chasm between visually convincing mimicry and causal understanding in surgical AI. Our findings from SurgVeo and the SPP establish a crucial foundation and roadmap for developing future models capable of navigating the complexities of specialized, real-world healthcare domains.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025 1

OmniSSR: Zero-shot Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution using Stable Diffusion Model

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 16, 2024

FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing

The diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in text-based image generation. However, since it contains enormous randomness in generation progress, it is still challenging to apply such models for real-world visual content editing, especially in videos. In this paper, we propose FateZero, a zero-shot text-based editing method on real-world videos without per-prompt training or use-specific mask. To edit videos consistently, we propose several techniques based on the pre-trained models. Firstly, in contrast to the straightforward DDIM inversion technique, our approach captures intermediate attention maps during inversion, which effectively retain both structural and motion information. These maps are directly fused in the editing process rather than generated during denoising. To further minimize semantic leakage of the source video, we then fuse self-attentions with a blending mask obtained by cross-attention features from the source prompt. Furthermore, we have implemented a reform of the self-attention mechanism in denoising UNet by introducing spatial-temporal attention to ensure frame consistency. Yet succinct, our method is the first one to show the ability of zero-shot text-driven video style and local attribute editing from the trained text-to-image model. We also have a better zero-shot shape-aware editing ability based on the text-to-video model. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior temporal consistency and editing capability than previous works.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 16, 2023

Jurassic World Remake: Bringing Ancient Fossils Back to Life via Zero-Shot Long Image-to-Image Translation

With a strong understanding of the target domain from natural language, we produce promising results in translating across large domain gaps and bringing skeletons back to life. In this work, we use text-guided latent diffusion models for zero-shot image-to-image translation (I2I) across large domain gaps (longI2I), where large amounts of new visual features and new geometry need to be generated to enter the target domain. Being able to perform translations across large domain gaps has a wide variety of real-world applications in criminology, astrology, environmental conservation, and paleontology. In this work, we introduce a new task Skull2Animal for translating between skulls and living animals. On this task, we find that unguided Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are not capable of translating across large domain gaps. Instead of these traditional I2I methods, we explore the use of guided diffusion and image editing models and provide a new benchmark model, Revive-2I, capable of performing zero-shot I2I via text-prompting latent diffusion models. We find that guidance is necessary for longI2I because, to bridge the large domain gap, prior knowledge about the target domain is needed. In addition, we find that prompting provides the best and most scalable information about the target domain as classifier-guided diffusion models require retraining for specific use cases and lack stronger constraints on the target domain because of the wide variety of images they are trained on.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 14, 2023 1

VQA-Diff: Exploiting VQA and Diffusion for Zero-Shot Image-to-3D Vehicle Asset Generation in Autonomous Driving

Generating 3D vehicle assets from in-the-wild observations is crucial to autonomous driving. Existing image-to-3D methods cannot well address this problem because they learn generation merely from image RGB information without a deeper understanding of in-the-wild vehicles (such as car models, manufacturers, etc.). This leads to their poor zero-shot prediction capability to handle real-world observations with occlusion or tricky viewing angles. To solve this problem, in this work, we propose VQA-Diff, a novel framework that leverages in-the-wild vehicle images to create photorealistic 3D vehicle assets for autonomous driving. VQA-Diff exploits the real-world knowledge inherited from the Large Language Model in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) model for robust zero-shot prediction and the rich image prior knowledge in the Diffusion model for structure and appearance generation. In particular, we utilize a multi-expert Diffusion Models strategy to generate the structure information and employ a subject-driven structure-controlled generation mechanism to model appearance information. As a result, without the necessity to learn from a large-scale image-to-3D vehicle dataset collected from the real world, VQA-Diff still has a robust zero-shot image-to-novel-view generation ability. We conduct experiments on various datasets, including Pascal 3D+, Waymo, and Objaverse, to demonstrate that VQA-Diff outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 8, 2024

TrackVLA++: Unleashing Reasoning and Memory Capabilities in VLA Models for Embodied Visual Tracking

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space

Reasoning is central to purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, which limits adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), a class of vision-language-action models that integrate perception, planning, and control through a structured three-stage pipeline. Our model, MolmoAct, encodes observations and instructions into depth-aware perception tokens, generates mid-level spatial plans as editable trajectory traces, and predicts precise low-level actions, enabling explainable and steerable behavior. MolmoAct-7B-D achieves strong performance across simulation and real-world settings: 70.5% zero-shot accuracy on SimplerEnv Visual Matching tasks, surpassing closed-source Pi-0 and GR00T N1; 86.6% average success on LIBERO, including an additional 6.3% gain over ThinkAct on long-horizon tasks; and in real-world fine-tuning, an additional 10% (single-arm) and an additional 22.7% (bimanual) task progression over Pi-0-FAST. It also outperforms baselines by an additional 23.3% on out-of-distribution generalization and achieves top human-preference scores for open-ended instruction following and trajectory steering. Furthermore, we release, for the first time, the MolmoAct Dataset -- a mid-training robot dataset comprising over 10,000 high quality robot trajectories across diverse scenarios and tasks. Training with this dataset yields an average 5.5% improvement in general performance over the base model. We release all model weights, training code, our collected dataset, and our action reasoning dataset, establishing MolmoAct as both a state-of-the-art robotics foundation model and an open blueprint for building ARMs that transform perception into purposeful action through structured reasoning. Blogpost: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact

allenai Ai2
·
Aug 11, 2025 2

PIG-Nav: Key Insights for Pretrained Image Goal Navigation Models

Recent studies have explored pretrained (foundation) models for vision-based robotic navigation, aiming to achieve generalizable navigation and positive transfer across diverse environments while enhancing zero-shot performance in unseen settings. In this work, we introduce PIG-Nav (Pretrained Image-Goal Navigation), a new approach that further investigates pretraining strategies for vision-based navigation models and contributes in two key areas. Model-wise, we identify two critical design choices that consistently improve the performance of pretrained navigation models: (1) integrating an early-fusion network structure to combine visual observations and goal images via appropriately pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) image encoder, and (2) introducing suitable auxiliary tasks to enhance global navigation representation learning, thus further improving navigation performance. Dataset-wise, we propose a novel data preprocessing pipeline for efficiently labeling large-scale game video datasets for navigation model training. We demonstrate that augmenting existing open navigation datasets with diverse gameplay videos improves model performance. Our model achieves an average improvement of 22.6% in zero-shot settings and a 37.5% improvement in fine-tuning settings over existing visual navigation foundation models in two complex simulated environments and one real-world environment. These results advance the state-of-the-art in pretrained image-goal navigation models. Notably, our model maintains competitive performance while requiring significantly less fine-tuning data, highlighting its potential for real-world deployment with minimal labeled supervision.

  • 17 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025

MoAI: Mixture of All Intelligence for Large Language and Vision Models

The rise of large language models (LLMs) and instruction tuning has led to the current trend of instruction-tuned large language and vision models (LLVMs). This trend involves either meticulously curating numerous instruction tuning datasets tailored to specific objectives or enlarging LLVMs to manage vast amounts of vision language (VL) data. However, current LLVMs have disregarded the detailed and comprehensive real-world scene understanding available from specialized computer vision (CV) models in visual perception tasks such as segmentation, detection, scene graph generation (SGG), and optical character recognition (OCR). Instead, the existing LLVMs rely mainly on the large capacity and emergent capabilities of their LLM backbones. Therefore, we present a new LLVM, Mixture of All Intelligence (MoAI), which leverages auxiliary visual information obtained from the outputs of external segmentation, detection, SGG, and OCR models. MoAI operates through two newly introduced modules: MoAI-Compressor and MoAI-Mixer. After verbalizing the outputs of the external CV models, the MoAI-Compressor aligns and condenses them to efficiently use relevant auxiliary visual information for VL tasks. MoAI-Mixer then blends three types of intelligence (1) visual features, (2) auxiliary features from the external CV models, and (3) language features by utilizing the concept of Mixture of Experts. Through this integration, MoAI significantly outperforms both open-source and closed-source LLVMs in numerous zero-shot VL tasks, particularly those related to real-world scene understanding such as object existence, positions, relations, and OCR without enlarging the model size or curating extra visual instruction tuning datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024 7

Visual Modality Prompt for Adapting Vision-Language Object Detectors

The zero-shot performance of object detectors degrades when tested on different modalities, such as infrared and depth. While recent work has explored image translation techniques to adapt detectors to new modalities, these methods are limited to a single modality and apply only to traditional detectors. Recently, vision-language detectors, such as YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, have shown promising zero-shot capabilities, however, they have not yet been adapted for other visual modalities. Traditional fine-tuning approaches compromise the zero-shot capabilities of the detectors. The visual prompt strategies commonly used for classification with vision-language models apply the same linear prompt translation to each image, making them less effective. To address these limitations, we propose ModPrompt, a visual prompt strategy to adapt vision-language detectors to new modalities without degrading zero-shot performance. In particular, an encoder-decoder visual prompt strategy is proposed, further enhanced by the integration of inference-friendly modality prompt decoupled residual, facilitating a more robust adaptation. Empirical benchmarking results show our method for modality adaptation on two vision-language detectors, YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, and on challenging infrared (LLVIP, FLIR) and depth (NYUv2) datasets, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning while preserving the model's zero-shot capability. Code available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/ModPrompt.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2024

You See it, You Got it: Learning 3D Creation on Pose-Free Videos at Scale

Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024 3

Zero-Shot Scene Understanding for Automatic Target Recognition Using Large Vision-Language Models

Automatic target recognition (ATR) plays a critical role in tasks such as navigation and surveillance, where safety and accuracy are paramount. In extreme use cases, such as military applications, these factors are often challenged due to the presence of unknown terrains, environmental conditions, and novel object categories. Current object detectors, including open-world detectors, lack the ability to confidently recognize novel objects or operate in unknown environments, as they have not been exposed to these new conditions. However, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit emergent properties that enable them to recognize objects in varying conditions in a zero-shot manner. Despite this, LVLMs struggle to localize objects effectively within a scene. To address these limitations, we propose a novel pipeline that combines the detection capabilities of open-world detectors with the recognition confidence of LVLMs, creating a robust system for zero-shot ATR of novel classes and unknown domains. In this study, we compare the performance of various LVLMs for recognizing military vehicles, which are often underrepresented in training datasets. Additionally, we examine the impact of factors such as distance range, modality, and prompting methods on the recognition performance, providing insights into the development of more reliable ATR systems for novel conditions and classes.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 13, 2025

Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) is an emerging AD paradigm. Unlike the traditional unsupervised AD setting that requires a large number of normal samples to train a model, ZSAD is more practical for handling data-restricted real-world scenarios. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown revolutionary reasoning capabilities in various vision tasks. However, the reasoning of image abnormalities remains underexplored due to the lack of corresponding datasets and benchmarks. To facilitate research in AD & reasoning, we establish the first visual instruction tuning dataset, Anomaly-Instruct-125k, and the evaluation benchmark, VisA-D&R. Through investigation with our benchmark, we reveal that current MLLMs like GPT-4o cannot accurately detect and describe fine-grained anomalous details in images. To address this, we propose Anomaly-OneVision (Anomaly-OV), the first specialist visual assistant for ZSAD and reasoning. Inspired by human behavior in visual inspection, Anomaly-OV leverages a Look-Twice Feature Matching (LTFM) mechanism to adaptively select and emphasize abnormal visual tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Anomaly-OV achieves significant improvements over advanced generalist models in both detection and reasoning. Extensions to medical and 3D AD are provided for future study. The link to our project page: https://xujiacong.github.io/Anomaly-OV/

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025

FunCineForge: A Unified Dataset Toolkit and Model for Zero-Shot Movie Dubbing in Diverse Cinematic Scenes

Movie dubbing is the task of synthesizing speech from scripts conditioned on video scenes, requiring accurate lip sync, faithful timbre transfer, and proper modeling of character identity and emotion. However, existing methods face two major limitations: (1) high-quality multimodal dubbing datasets are limited in scale, suffer from high word error rates, contain sparse annotations, rely on costly manual labeling, and are restricted to monologue scenes, all of which hinder effective model training; (2) existing dubbing models rely solely on the lip region to learn audio-visual alignment, which limits their applicability to complex live-action cinematic scenes, and exhibit suboptimal performance in lip sync, speech quality, and emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we propose FunCineForge, which comprises an end-to-end production pipeline for large-scale dubbing datasets and an MLLM-based dubbing model designed for diverse cinematic scenes. Using the pipeline, we construct the first Chinese television dubbing dataset with rich annotations, and demonstrate the high quality of these data. Experiments across monologue, narration, dialogue, and multi-speaker scenes show that our dubbing model consistently outperforms SOTA methods in audio quality, lip sync, timbre transfer, and instruction following. Code and demos are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FunCineForge.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 21

Multi-Modal Prototypes for Open-World Semantic Segmentation

In semantic segmentation, generalizing a visual system to both seen categories and novel categories at inference time has always been practically valuable yet challenging. To enable such functionality, existing methods mainly rely on either providing several support demonstrations from the visual aspect or characterizing the informative clues from the textual aspect (e.g., the class names). Nevertheless, both two lines neglect the complementary intrinsic of low-level visual and high-level language information, while the explorations that consider visual and textual modalities as a whole to promote predictions are still limited. To close this gap, we propose to encompass textual and visual clues as multi-modal prototypes to allow more comprehensive support for open-world semantic segmentation, and build a novel prototype-based segmentation framework to realize this promise. To be specific, unlike the straightforward combination of bi-modal clues, we decompose the high-level language information as multi-aspect prototypes and aggregate the low-level visual information as more semantic prototypes, on basis of which, a fine-grained complementary fusion makes the multi-modal prototypes more powerful and accurate to promote the prediction. Based on an elastic mask prediction module that permits any number and form of prototype inputs, we are able to solve the zero-shot, few-shot and generalized counterpart tasks in one architecture. Extensive experiments on both PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets show the consistent superiority of the proposed method compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches, and a range of ablation studies thoroughly dissects each component in our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively that verify their effectiveness.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 4, 2023

4DWorldBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for 3D/4D World Generation Models

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/.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

Can World Models Benefit VLMs for World Dynamics?

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.

PekingUniversity Peking University
·
Oct 1, 2025

Zero-to-Hero: Enhancing Zero-Shot Novel View Synthesis via Attention Map Filtering

Generating realistic images from arbitrary views based on a single source image remains a significant challenge in computer vision, with broad applications ranging from e-commerce to immersive virtual experiences. Recent advancements in diffusion models, particularly the Zero-1-to-3 model, have been widely adopted for generating plausible views, videos, and 3D models. However, these models still struggle with inconsistencies and implausibility in new views generation, especially for challenging changes in viewpoint. In this work, we propose Zero-to-Hero, a novel test-time approach that enhances view synthesis by manipulating attention maps during the denoising process of Zero-1-to-3. By drawing an analogy between the denoising process and stochastic gradient descent (SGD), we implement a filtering mechanism that aggregates attention maps, enhancing generation reliability and authenticity. This process improves geometric consistency without requiring retraining or significant computational resources. Additionally, we modify the self-attention mechanism to integrate information from the source view, reducing shape distortions. These processes are further supported by a specialized sampling schedule. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in fidelity and consistency, validated on a diverse set of out-of-distribution objects. Additionally, we demonstrate the general applicability and effectiveness of Zero-to-Hero in multi-view, and image generation conditioned on semantic maps and pose.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28, 2024

WorldReel: 4D Video Generation with Consistent Geometry and Motion Modeling

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

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis

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.

naver-ai NAVER AI Lab
·
Mar 16 4

TeleWorld: Towards Dynamic Multimodal Synthesis with a 4D World Model

World models aim to endow AI systems with the ability to represent, generate, and interact with dynamic environments in a coherent and temporally consistent manner. While recent video generation models have demonstrated impressive visual quality, they remain limited in real-time interaction, long-horizon consistency, and persistent memory of dynamic scenes, hindering their evolution into practical world models. In this report, we present TeleWorld, a real-time multimodal 4D world modeling framework that unifies video generation, dynamic scene reconstruction, and long-term world memory within a closed-loop system. TeleWorld introduces a novel generation-reconstruction-guidance paradigm, where generated video streams are continuously reconstructed into a dynamic 4D spatio-temporal representation, which in turn guides subsequent generation to maintain spatial, temporal, and physical consistency. To support long-horizon generation with low latency, we employ an autoregressive diffusion-based video model enhanced with Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL)--a hierarchical planning method that reduces error accumulation from frame-level to segment-level-alongside efficient Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), enabling real-time synthesis under practical computational budgets. Our approach achieves seamless integration of dynamic object modeling and static scene representation within a unified 4D framework, advancing world models toward practical, interactive, and computationally accessible systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeleWorld achieves strong performance in both static and dynamic world understanding, long-term consistency, and real-time generation efficiency, positioning it as a practical step toward interactive, memory-enabled world models for multimodal generation and embodied intelligence.

  • 27 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025

Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory

We propose Infinite-World, a robust interactive world model capable of maintaining coherent visual memory over 1000+ frames in complex real-world environments. While existing world models can be efficiently optimized on synthetic data with perfect ground-truth, they lack an effective training paradigm for real-world videos due to noisy pose estimations and the scarcity of viewpoint revisits. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a Hierarchical Pose-free Memory Compressor (HPMC) that recursively distills historical latents into a fixed-budget representation. By jointly optimizing the compressor with the generative backbone, HPMC enables the model to autonomously anchor generations in the distant past with bounded computational cost, eliminating the need for explicit geometric priors. Second, we propose an Uncertainty-aware Action Labeling module that discretizes continuous motion into a tri-state logic. This strategy maximizes the utilization of raw video data while shielding the deterministic action space from being corrupted by noisy trajectories, ensuring robust action-response learning. Furthermore, guided by insights from a pilot toy study, we employ a Revisit-Dense Finetuning Strategy using a compact, 30-minute dataset to efficiently activate the model's long-range loop-closure capabilities. Extensive experiments, including objective metrics and user studies, demonstrate that Infinite-World achieves superior performance in visual quality, action controllability, and spatial consistency.

MeiGen-AI MeiGen-AI
·
Feb 2 3

Think, Act, Build: An Agentic Framework with Vision Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding

3D Visual Grounding (3D-VG) aims to localize objects in 3D scenes via natural language descriptions. While recent advancements leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have explored zero-shot possibilities, they typically suffer from a static workflow relying on preprocessed 3D point clouds, essentially degrading grounding into proposal matching. To bypass this reliance, our core motivation is to decouple the task: leveraging 2D VLMs to resolve complex spatial semantics, while relying on deterministic multi-view geometry to instantiate the 3D structure. Driven by this insight, we propose "Think, Act, Build (TAB)", a dynamic agentic framework that reformulates 3D-VG tasks as a generative 2D-to-3D reconstruction paradigm operating directly on raw RGB-D streams. Specifically, guided by a specialized 3D-VG skill, our VLM agent dynamically invokes visual tools to track and reconstruct the target across 2D frames. Crucially, to overcome the multi-view coverage deficit caused by strict VLM semantic tracking, we introduce the Semantic-Anchored Geometric Expansion, a mechanism that first anchors the target in a reference video clip and then leverages multi-view geometry to propagate its spatial location across unobserved frames. This enables the agent to "Build" the target's 3D representation by aggregating these multi-view features via camera parameters, directly mapping 2D visual cues to 3D coordinates. Furthermore, to ensure rigorous assessment, we identify flaws such as reference ambiguity and category errors in existing benchmarks and manually refine the incorrect queries. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our framework, relying entirely on open-source models, significantly outperforms previous zero-shot methods and even surpasses fully supervised baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1 2

Adapting Vision-Language Models for Evaluating World Models

World models -- generative models that simulate environment dynamics conditioned on past observations and actions -- are gaining prominence in planning, simulation, and embodied AI. However, evaluating their rollouts remains a fundamental challenge, requiring fine-grained, temporally grounded assessment of action alignment and semantic consistency -- capabilities not captured by existing metrics. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise as automatic evaluators of generative content due to their strong multimodal reasoning abilities. Yet, their use in fine-grained, temporally sensitive evaluation tasks remains limited and requires targeted adaptation. We introduce a evaluation protocol targeting two recognition tasks -- action recognition and character recognition -- each assessed across binary, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats. To support this, we present UNIVERSE (UNIfied Vision-language Evaluator for Rollouts in Simulated Environments), a method for adapting VLMs to rollout evaluation under data and compute constraints. We conduct a large-scale study comparing full, partial, and parameter-efficient finetuning across task formats, context lengths, sampling strategies, and data compositions. The resulting unified evaluator matches the performance of task-specific baselines using a single checkpoint. Human studies confirm strong alignment with human judgments, establishing UNIVERSE as a scalable, semantics-aware evaluator for world models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025

LiveWorld: Simulating Out-of-Sight Dynamics in Generative Video World Models

Recent generative video world models aim to simulate visual environment evolution, allowing an observer to interactively explore the scene via camera control. However, they implicitly assume that the world only evolves within the observer's field of view. Once an object leaves the observer's view, its state is "frozen" in memory, and revisiting the same region later often fails to reflect events that should have occurred in the meantime. In this work, we identify and formalize this overlooked limitation as the "out-of-sight dynamics" problem, which impedes video world models from representing a continuously evolving world. To address this issue, we propose LiveWorld, a novel framework that extends video world models to support persistent world evolution. Instead of treating the world as static observational memory, LiveWorld models a persistent global state composed of a static 3D background and dynamic entities that continue evolving even when unobserved. To maintain these unseen dynamics, LiveWorld introduces a monitor-based mechanism that autonomously simulates the temporal progression of active entities and synchronizes their evolved states upon revisiting, ensuring spatially coherent rendering. For evaluation, we further introduce LiveBench, a dedicated benchmark for the task of maintaining out-of-sight dynamics. Extensive experiments show that LiveWorld enables persistent event evolution and long-term scene consistency, bridging the gap between existing 2D observation-based memory and true 4D dynamic world simulation. The baseline and benchmark will be publicly available at https://zichengduan.github.io/LiveWorld/index.html.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 7 2

ZeroScene: A Zero-Shot Framework for 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image and Controllable Texture Editing

In the field of 3D content generation, single image scene reconstruction methods still struggle to simultaneously ensure the quality of individual assets and the coherence of the overall scene in complex environments, while texture editing techniques often fail to maintain both local continuity and multi-view consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel system ZeroScene, which leverages the prior knowledge of large vision models to accomplish both single image-to-3D scene reconstruction and texture editing in a zero-shot manner. ZeroScene extracts object-level 2D segmentation and depth information from input images to infer spatial relationships within the scene. It then jointly optimizes 3D and 2D projection losses of the point cloud to update object poses for precise scene alignment, ultimately constructing a coherent and complete 3D scene that encompasses both foreground and background. Moreover, ZeroScene supports texture editing of objects in the scene. By imposing constraints on the diffusion model and introducing a mask-guided progressive image generation strategy, we effectively maintain texture consistency across multiple viewpoints and further enhance the realism of rendered results through Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only ensures the geometric and appearance accuracy of generated assets, but also faithfully reconstructs scene layouts and produces highly detailed textures that closely align with text prompts.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 27, 2025

FlashWorld: High-quality 3D Scene Generation within Seconds

We propose FlashWorld, a generative model that produces 3D scenes from a single image or text prompt in seconds, 10~100times faster than previous works while possessing superior rendering quality. Our approach shifts from the conventional multi-view-oriented (MV-oriented) paradigm, which generates multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction, to a 3D-oriented approach where the model directly produces 3D Gaussian representations during multi-view generation. While ensuring 3D consistency, 3D-oriented method typically suffers poor visual quality. FlashWorld includes a dual-mode pre-training phase followed by a cross-mode post-training phase, effectively integrating the strengths of both paradigms. Specifically, leveraging the prior from a video diffusion model, we first pre-train a dual-mode multi-view diffusion model, which jointly supports MV-oriented and 3D-oriented generation modes. To bridge the quality gap in 3D-oriented generation, we further propose a cross-mode post-training distillation by matching distribution from consistent 3D-oriented mode to high-quality MV-oriented mode. This not only enhances visual quality while maintaining 3D consistency, but also reduces the required denoising steps for inference. Also, we propose a strategy to leverage massive single-view images and text prompts during this process to enhance the model's generalization to out-of-distribution inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our method.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 15, 2025 2

Simulating the Visual World with Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap

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

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025 3

Generative Visual Code Mobile World Models

Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) World Models (WMs) offer a promising path for improving mobile GUI agent performance at train- and inference-time. However, current approaches face a critical trade-off: text-based WMs sacrifice visual fidelity, while the inability of visual WMs in precise text rendering led to their reliance on slow, complex pipelines dependent on numerous external models. We propose a novel paradigm: visual world modeling via renderable code generation, where a single Vision-Language Model (VLM) predicts the next GUI state as executable web code that renders to pixels, rather than generating pixels directly. This combines the strengths of both approaches: VLMs retain their linguistic priors for precise text rendering while their pre-training on structured web code enables high-fidelity visual generation. We introduce gWorld (8B, 32B), the first open-weight visual mobile GUI WMs built on this paradigm, along with a data generation framework (gWorld) that automatically synthesizes code-based training data. In extensive evaluation across 4 in- and 2 out-of-distribution benchmarks, gWorld sets a new pareto frontier in accuracy versus model size, outperforming 8 frontier open-weight models over 50.25x larger. Further analyses show that (1) scaling training data via gWorld yields meaningful gains, (2) each component of our pipeline improves data quality, and (3) stronger world modeling improves downstream mobile GUI policy performance.

Improved Zero-Shot Classification by Adapting VLMs with Text Descriptions

The zero-shot performance of existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP is limited by the availability of large-scale, aligned image and text datasets in specific domains. In this work, we leverage two complementary sources of information -- descriptions of categories generated by large language models (LLMs) and abundant, fine-grained image classification datasets -- to improve the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs across fine-grained domains. On the technical side, we develop methods to train VLMs with this "bag-level" image-text supervision. We find that simply using these attributes at test-time does not improve performance, but our training strategy, for example, on the iNaturalist dataset, leads to an average improvement of 4-5% in zero-shot classification accuracy for novel categories of birds and flowers. Similar improvements are observed in domains where a subset of the categories was used to fine-tune the model. By prompting LLMs in various ways, we generate descriptions that capture visual appearance, habitat, and geographic regions and pair them with existing attributes such as the taxonomic structure of the categories. We systematically evaluate their ability to improve zero-shot categorization in natural domains. Our findings suggest that geographic priors can be just as effective and are complementary to visual appearance. Our method also outperforms prior work on prompt-based tuning of VLMs. We release the benchmark, consisting of 14 datasets at https://github.com/cvl-umass/AdaptCLIPZS , which will contribute to future research in zero-shot recognition.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 4, 2024

HunyuanWorld 1.0: Generating Immersive, Explorable, and Interactive 3D Worlds from Words or Pixels

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

  • 55 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025 7

Re-Thinking Inverse Graphics With Large Language Models

Inverse graphics -- the task of inverting an image into physical variables that, when rendered, enable reproduction of the observed scene -- is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Disentangling an image into its constituent elements, such as the shape, color, and material properties of the objects of the 3D scene that produced it, requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This requirement limits the ability of existing carefully engineered approaches to generalize across domains. Inspired by the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to generalize to novel contexts, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the broad world knowledge encoded in such models in solving inverse-graphics problems. To this end, we propose the Inverse-Graphics Large Language Model (IG-LLM), an inverse-graphics framework centered around an LLM, that autoregressively decodes a visual embedding into a structured, compositional 3D-scene representation. We incorporate a frozen pre-trained visual encoder and a continuous numeric head to enable end-to-end training. Through our investigation, we demonstrate the potential of LLMs to facilitate inverse graphics through next-token prediction, without the use of image-space supervision. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for precise spatial reasoning about images that exploit the visual knowledge of LLMs. We will release our code and data to ensure the reproducibility of our investigation and to facilitate future research at https://ig-llm.is.tue.mpg.de/

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation

Internal world models (WMs) enable agents to understand the world's state and predict transitions, serving as the basis for advanced deliberative reasoning. Recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI o3, GPT-4o and Gemini, exhibit potential as general-purpose WMs. While the latest studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, a systematic evaluation of VLMs' fundamental WM abilities remains absent. Drawing on comparative psychology and cognitive science, we propose a two-stage framework that assesses Perception (visual, spatial, temporal, quantitative, and motion) and Prediction (mechanistic simulation, transitive inference, compositional inference) to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. Guided by this framework, we introduce WM-ABench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 23 fine-grained evaluation dimensions across 6 diverse simulated environments with controlled counterfactual simulations. Through 660 experiments on 15 latest commercial and open-source VLMs, we find that these models exhibit striking limitations in basic world modeling abilities. For instance, almost all models perform at near-random accuracy when distinguishing motion trajectories. Additionally, they lack disentangled understanding -- e.g., some models tend to believe blue objects move faster than green ones. More rich results and analyses reveal significant gaps between VLMs and human-level world modeling.

  • 24 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025 1

Text-Based Reasoning About Vector Graphics

While large multimodal models excel in broad vision-language benchmarks, they often struggle with tasks requiring precise perception of low-level visual details, such as comparing line lengths or solving simple mazes. In particular, this failure mode persists in question-answering tasks about vector graphics -- images composed purely of 2D objects and shapes. To address this challenge, we propose the Visually Descriptive Language Model (VDLM), which performs text-based reasoning about vector graphics. VDLM leverages Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for a more precise visual description and first uses an off-the-shelf raster-to-SVG algorithm for encoding. Since existing language models cannot understand raw SVGs in a zero-shot setting, VDLM then bridges SVG with pretrained language models through a newly introduced intermediate symbolic representation, Primal Visual Description (PVD), comprising primitive attributes (e.g., shape, position, measurement) with their corresponding predicted values. PVD is task-agnostic and represents visual primitives that are universal across all vector graphics. It can be learned with procedurally generated (SVG, PVD) pairs and also enables the direct use of LLMs for generalization to complex reasoning tasks. By casting an image to a text-based representation, we can leverage the power of language models to learn alignment from SVG to visual primitives and generalize to unseen question-answering tasks. Empirical results show that VDLM achieves stronger zero-shot performance compared to state-of-the-art LMMs, such as GPT-4V, in various low-level multimodal perception and reasoning tasks on vector graphics. We additionally present extensive analyses on VDLM's performance, demonstrating that our framework offers better interpretability due to its disentangled perception and reasoning processes. Project page: https://mikewangwzhl.github.io/VDLM/

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

WorldStereo: Bridging Camera-Guided Video Generation and Scene Reconstruction via 3D Geometric Memories

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

tencent Tencent
·
Mar 2 2

Fine-Grained Visual Prompting

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities in image-level visual perception. However, these models have shown limited performance in instance-level tasks that demand precise localization and recognition. Previous works have suggested that incorporating visual prompts, such as colorful boxes or circles, can improve the ability of models to recognize objects of interest. Nonetheless, compared to language prompting, visual prompting designs are rarely explored. Existing approaches, which employ coarse visual cues such as colorful boxes or circles, often result in sub-optimal performance due to the inclusion of irrelevant and noisy pixels. In this paper, we carefully study the visual prompting designs by exploring more fine-grained markings, such as segmentation masks and their variations. In addition, we introduce a new zero-shot framework that leverages pixel-level annotations acquired from a generalist segmentation model for fine-grained visual prompting. Consequently, our investigation reveals that a straightforward application of blur outside the target mask, referred to as the Blur Reverse Mask, exhibits exceptional effectiveness. This proposed prompting strategy leverages the precise mask annotations to reduce focus on weakly related regions while retaining spatial coherence between the target and the surrounding background. Our Fine-Grained Visual Prompting (FGVP) demonstrates superior performance in zero-shot comprehension of referring expressions on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks. It outperforms prior methods by an average margin of 3.0% to 4.6%, with a maximum improvement of 12.5% on the RefCOCO+ testA subset. Code is available at https://github.com/ylingfeng/FGVP.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds

Recent advances in video generation enable a new paradigm for 3D scene creation: generating camera-controlled videos that simulate scene walkthroughs, then lifting them to 3D via feed-forward reconstruction techniques. This generative reconstruction approach combines the visual fidelity and creative capacity of video models with 3D outputs ready for real-time rendering and simulation. Scaling to large, complex environments requires 3D-consistent video generation over long camera trajectories with large viewpoint changes and location revisits, a setting where current video models degrade quickly. Existing methods for long-horizon generation are fundamentally limited by two forms of degradation: spatial forgetting and temporal drifting. As exploration proceeds, previously observed regions fall outside the model's temporal context, forcing the model to hallucinate structures when revisited. Meanwhile, autoregressive generation accumulates small synthesis errors over time, gradually distorting scene appearance and geometry. We present Lyra 2.0, a framework for generating persistent, explorable 3D worlds at scale. To address spatial forgetting, we maintain per-frame 3D geometry and use it solely for information routing -- retrieving relevant past frames and establishing dense correspondences with the target viewpoints -- while relying on the generative prior for appearance synthesis. To address temporal drifting, we train with self-augmented histories that expose the model to its own degraded outputs, teaching it to correct drift rather than propagate it. Together, these enable substantially longer and 3D-consistent video trajectories, which we leverage to fine-tune feed-forward reconstruction models that reliably recover high-quality 3D scenes.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Apr 13 2

MagicWorld: Interactive Geometry-driven Video World Exploration

Recent interactive video world model methods generate scene evolution conditioned on user instructions. Although they achieve impressive results, two key limitations remain. First, they fail to fully exploit the correspondence between instruction-driven scene motion and the underlying 3D geometry, which results in structural instability under viewpoint changes. Second, they easily forget historical information during multi-step interaction, resulting in error accumulation and progressive drift in scene semantics and structure. To address these issues, we propose MagicWorld, an interactive video world model that integrates 3D geometric priors and historical retrieval. MagicWorld starts from a single scene image, employs user actions to drive dynamic scene evolution, and autoregressively synthesizes continuous scenes. We introduce the Action-Guided 3D Geometry Module (AG3D), which constructs a point cloud from the first frame of each interaction and the corresponding action, providing explicit geometric constraints for viewpoint transitions and thereby improving structural consistency. We further propose History Cache Retrieval (HCR) mechanism, which retrieves relevant historical frames during generation and injects them as conditioning signals, helping the model utilize past scene information and mitigate error accumulation. Experimental results demonstrate that MagicWorld achieves notable improvements in scene stability and continuity across interaction iterations.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025 3

Omni-WorldBench: Towards a Comprehensive Interaction-Centric Evaluation for World Models

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

alibaba-inc alibaba-inc
·
Mar 23 10

Stereo World Model: Camera-Guided Stereo Video Generation

We present StereoWorld, a camera-conditioned stereo world model that jointly learns appearance and binocular geometry for end-to-end stereo video generation.Unlike monocular RGB or RGBD approaches, StereoWorld operates exclusively within the RGB modality, while simultaneously grounding geometry directly from disparity. To efficiently achieve consistent stereo generation, our approach introduces two key designs: (1) a unified camera-frame RoPE that augments latent tokens with camera-aware rotary positional encoding, enabling relative, view- and time-consistent conditioning while preserving pretrained video priors via a stable attention initialization; and (2) a stereo-aware attention decomposition that factors full 4D attention into 3D intra-view attention plus horizontal row attention, leveraging the epipolar prior to capture disparity-aligned correspondences with substantially lower compute. Across benchmarks, StereoWorld improves stereo consistency, disparity accuracy, and camera-motion fidelity over strong monocular-then-convert pipelines, achieving more than 3x faster generation with an additional 5% gain in viewpoint consistency. Beyond benchmarks, StereoWorld enables end-to-end binocular VR rendering without depth estimation or inpainting, enhances embodied policy learning through metric-scale depth grounding, and is compatible with long-video distillation for extended interactive stereo synthesis.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18 2

Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory

With the advancement of interactive video generation, diffusion models have increasingly demonstrated their potential as world models. However, existing approaches still struggle to simultaneously achieve memory-enabled long-term temporal consistency and high-resolution real-time generation, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we present Matrix-Game 3.0, a memory-augmented interactive world model designed for 720p real-time longform video generation. Building upon Matrix-Game 2.0, we introduce systematic improvements across data, model, and inference. First, we develop an upgraded industrial-scale infinite data engine that integrates Unreal Engine-based synthetic data, large-scale automated collection from AAA games, and real-world video augmentation to produce high-quality Video-Pose-Action-Prompt quadruplet data at scale. Second, we propose a training framework for long-horizon consistency: by modeling prediction residuals and re-injecting imperfect generated frames during training, the base model learns self-correction; meanwhile, camera-aware memory retrieval and injection enable the base model to achieve long horizon spatiotemporal consistency. Third, we design a multi-segment autoregressive distillation strategy based on Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), combined with model quantization and VAE decoder pruning, to achieve efficient real-time inference. Experimental results show that Matrix-Game 3.0 achieves up to 40 FPS real-time generation at 720p resolution with a 5B model, while maintaining stable memory consistency over minute-long sequences. Scaling up to a 2x14B model further improves generation quality, dynamics, and generalization. Our approach provides a practical pathway toward industrial-scale deployable world models.

  • 23 authors
·
Apr 9 2

DynamicVerse: A Physically-Aware Multimodal Framework for 4D World Modeling

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

Dynamics-X Dynamics-X
·
Dec 2, 2025 3

Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction

Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only for future frame prediction can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior work reading out depth or illumination from video generators required fine-tuning, which is impractical for flow where labels are scarce and synthetic datasets suffer from a sim-to-real gap. Inspired by the Counterfactual World Model (CWM) paradigm, which can obtain point-wise correspondences by injecting a small tracer perturbation into a next-frame predictor and tracking its propagation, we extend this idea to generative video models. We explore several popular architectures and find that successful zero-shot flow extraction in this manner is aided by three model properties: (1) distributional prediction of future frames (avoiding blurry or noisy outputs); (2) factorized latents that treat each spatio-temporal patch independently; and (3) random-access decoding that can condition on any subset of future pixels. These properties are uniquely present in the recent Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) architecture. Building on LRAS, we propose KL-tracing: a novel test-time procedure that injects a localized perturbation into the first frame, rolls out the model one step, and computes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between perturbed and unperturbed predictive distributions. Without any flow-specific fine-tuning, our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on real-world TAP-Vid DAVIS dataset (16.6% relative improvement for endpoint error) and synthetic TAP-Vid Kubric (4.7% relative improvement). Our results indicate that counterfactual prompting of controllable generative video models is a scalable and effective alternative to supervised or photometric-loss approaches for high-quality flow.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 11, 2025 1

FantasyWorld: Geometry-Consistent World Modeling via Unified Video and 3D Prediction

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

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

Video Generation Models in Robotics -- Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions

Video generation models have emerged as high-fidelity models of the physical world, capable of synthesizing high-quality videos capturing fine-grained interactions between agents and their environments conditioned on multi-modal user inputs. Their impressive capabilities address many of the long-standing challenges faced by physics-based simulators, driving broad adoption in many problem domains, e.g., robotics. For example, video models enable photorealistic, physically consistent deformable-body simulation without making prohibitive simplifying assumptions, which is a major bottleneck in physics-based simulation. Moreover, video models can serve as foundation world models that capture the dynamics of the world in a fine-grained and expressive way. They thus overcome the limited expressiveness of language-only abstractions in describing intricate physical interactions. In this survey, we provide a review of video models and their applications as embodied world models in robotics, encompassing cost-effective data generation and action prediction in imitation learning, dynamics and rewards modeling in reinforcement learning, visual planning, and policy evaluation. Further, we highlight important challenges hindering the trustworthy integration of video models in robotics, which include poor instruction following, hallucinations such as violations of physics, and unsafe content generation, in addition to fundamental limitations such as significant data curation, training, and inference costs. We present potential future directions to address these open research challenges to motivate research and ultimately facilitate broader applications, especially in safety-critical settings.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 12

Dimension-Reduction Attack! Video Generative Models are Experts on Controllable Image Synthesis

Video generative models can be regarded as world simulators due to their ability to capture dynamic, continuous changes inherent in real-world environments. These models integrate high-dimensional information across visual, temporal, spatial, and causal dimensions, enabling predictions of subjects in various status. A natural and valuable research direction is to explore whether a fully trained video generative model in high-dimensional space can effectively support lower-dimensional tasks such as controllable image generation. In this work, we propose a paradigm for video-to-image knowledge compression and task adaptation, termed Dimension-Reduction Attack (DRA-Ctrl), which utilizes the strengths of video models, including long-range context modeling and flatten full-attention, to perform various generation tasks. Specially, to address the challenging gap between continuous video frames and discrete image generation, we introduce a mixup-based transition strategy that ensures smooth adaptation. Moreover, we redesign the attention structure with a tailored masking mechanism to better align text prompts with image-level control. Experiments across diverse image generation tasks, such as subject-driven and spatially conditioned generation, show that repurposed video models outperform those trained directly on images. These results highlight the untapped potential of large-scale video generators for broader visual applications. DRA-Ctrl provides new insights into reusing resource-intensive video models and lays foundation for future unified generative models across visual modalities. The project page is https://dra-ctrl-2025.github.io/DRA-Ctrl/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Thinking in Frames: How Visual Context and Test-Time Scaling Empower Video Reasoning

Vision-Language Models have excelled at textual reasoning, but they often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and continuous action planning, failing to simulate the dynamics required for complex visual reasoning. In this work, we formulate visual reasoning by means of video generation models, positing that generated frames can act as intermediate reasoning steps between initial states and solutions. We evaluate their capacity in two distinct regimes: Maze Navigation for sequential discrete planning with low visual change and Tangram Puzzle for continuous manipulation with high visual change. Our experiments reveal three critical insights: (1) Robust Zero-Shot Generalization: In both tasks, the model demonstrates strong performance on unseen data distributions without specific finetuning. (2) Visual Context: The model effectively uses visual context as explicit control, such as agent icons and tangram shapes, enabling it to maintain high visual consistency and adapt its planning capability robustly to unseen patterns. (3) Visual Test-Time Scaling: We observe a test-time scaling law in sequential planning; increasing the generated video length (visual inference budget) empowers better zero-shot generalization to spatially and temporally complex paths. These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a media tool, but a scalable, generalizable paradigm for visual reasoning.