Does Physics Live in the Activations? Localizing Physical Quantities in Video Diffusion Models
Video generation models produce strikingly realistic sequences and are increasingly proposed as world models, yet recent benchmarks reveal pronounced deficits in their physical reasoning. This raises the question of whether these models internalize physical principles or merely reproduce familiar motion patterns. We address this by probing internal representations of video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for simulator-derived ground-truth physical quantities spanning kinematic motion and rigid-body dynamics under gravity and contact. We find that these quantities are linearly decodable with high accuracy early in the denoising process, substantially outperforming a baseline decoded directly...
| Authors | Jonas Kneifl, Jakub Skalski, Bartłomiej Twardowski et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 2 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 October 2026 |
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