Nanru Dai

Wenxin Ma, Chenlong Wang, Ruisheng Yuan et al.

Humans can look at a static scene and instantly predict what happens next -- will moving this object cause a collision? We call this ability Causal Spatial Reasoning. However, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) cannot do this, as they remain largely restricted to static spatial perception, struggling to answer "what-if" questions in a 3D scene. We introduce CausalSpatial, a diagnostic benchmark evaluating whether models can anticipate consequences of object motions across four tasks: Collision, Compatibility, Occlusion, and Trajectory. Results expose a severe gap: humans score 84% while GPT-5 achieves only 54%. Why do MLLMs fail? Our analysis uncovers a fundamental deficiency: models over-rely on textual chain-of-thought reasoning that drifts from visual evidence, producing fluent but spatially ungrounded hallucinations. To address this, we propose the Causal Object World model (COW), a framework that externalizes the simulation process by generating videos of hypothetical dynamics. With explicit visual cues of causality, COW enables models to ground their reasoning in physical reality rather than linguistic priors. We make the dataset and code publicly available here: https://github.com/CausalSpatial/CausalSpatial

Yifan Yin, Zehao Wen, Jieneng Chen et al.

Recent advances in visual generative models have highlighted the promise of learning generative world models. However, most existing approaches frame world modeling as novel-view synthesis or future-frame prediction, emphasizing visual realism rather than the structured uncertainty required by embodied agents acting under partial observability. In this work, we propose a different perspective: world modeling as embodied belief inference in 3D space. From this view, a world model should not merely render what may be seen, but maintain and update an agent's belief about the unobserved 3D world as new observations are acquired. We identify several key capabilities for such models, including spatially consistent scene memory, multi-hypothesis belief sampling, sequential belief updating, and semantically informed prediction of unseen regions. We instantiate these ideas in 3D-Belief, a generative 3D world model that infers explicit, actionable 3D beliefs from partial observations and updates them online over time. Unlike prior visual prediction models, 3D-Belief represents uncertainty directly in 3D, enabling embodied agents to imagine plausible scene completions and reason over partially observed environments. We evaluate 3D-Belief on 2D visual quality for scene memory and unobserved-scene imagination, object- and scene-level 3D imagination using our proposed 3D-CORE benchmark, and challenging object navigation tasks in both simulation and the real world. Experiments show that 3D-Belief improves 2D and 3D imagination quality and downstream embodied task performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Jiahan Zhang, Muqing Jiang, Nanru Dai et al.

Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchmarks adopt open-loop protocols that emphasize visual quality in isolation, leaving the core issue of embodied utility unresolved, i.e., do WMs actually help agents succeed at embodied tasks? To address this gap, we introduce World-in-World, the first open platform that benchmarks WMs in a closed-loop world that mirrors real agent-environment interactions. World-in-World provides a unified online planning strategy and a standardized action API, enabling heterogeneous WMs for decision making. We curate four closed-loop environments that rigorously evaluate diverse WMs, prioritize task success as the primary metric, and move beyond the common focus on visual quality; we also present the first data scaling law for world models in embodied settings. Our study uncovers three surprises: (1) visual quality alone does not guarantee task success, controllability matters more; (2) scaling post-training with action-observation data is more effective than upgrading the pretrained video generators; and (3) allocating more inference-time compute allows WMs to substantially improve closed-loop performance.