What-If World: A Causal Benchmark for General World Models in Embodied Scenarios
Video generation models are increasingly used as world simulators for tasks like driving and robotic manipulation. What matters in these settings is not whether a single video looks right, but whether the model's output changes when its input changes. We test this by giving a model two prompts describing the same scene with one physical detail varied, and checking whether the two videos diverge the way physics predicts. The wording difference between the prompts is small by design, since only one variable is changed, but the correct physical difference is not. A model that misses this can still produce two videos that each look plausible individually, and existing benchmarks score videos ...
| Authors | Kunlin Cai, Rui Song, Jinghuai Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 26 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 2026 |
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