# Can Test-Time Scaling Improve World Foundation Model?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24320 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24320/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 27 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10762/) (2024)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11931/) (2024)
- [Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09732/) (2025)
- [VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15252/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5: Harnessing Proof Assistant Feedback for Reinforcement Learning and Monte-Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08152/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Video Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14169/) (2024)
- [Can We Generate Images with CoT? Let's Verify and Reinforce Image Generation Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13926/) (2025)
- [Let's reward step by step: Step-Level reward model as the Navigators for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10080/) (2023)
- [DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19505/) (2024)
- [Make Every Move Count: LLM-based High-Quality RTL Code Generation Using MCTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03289/) (2024)
- [ComfyBench: Benchmarking LLM-based Agents in ComfyUI for Autonomously Designing Collaborative AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01392/) (2024)
- [ACT-Bench: Towards Action Controllable World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05337/) (2024)
- [BEATS: Optimizing LLM Mathematical Capabilities with BackVerify and Adaptive Disambiguate based Efficient Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17972/) (2024)
- [ComfyGen: Prompt-Adaptive Workflows for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01731/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13861/) (2026)
- [How Far Are We from Generating Missing Modalities with Foundation Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03530/) (2025)
- [A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Multi-Agent Dynamics in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28757/) (2026)
- [Interpretable Adaptive Sampling for LLM Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03961/) (2026)
- [CADMorph: Geometry-Driven Parametric CAD Editing via a Plan-Generate-Verify Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11480/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Photonics for Machine Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10841/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Scaling in Multimodal Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Generation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08231/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World foundation models, which simulate the physical world by predicting future states from current observations and inputs, have become central to many applications in physical intelligence, including autonomous driving and robotics. However, these models require substantial computational resources for pretraining and are further constrained by available data during post-training. As such, scaling computation at test time emerges as both a critical and practical alternative to traditional model enlargement or re-training. In this work, we introduce SWIFT, a test-time scaling framework tailored for WFMs. SWIFT integrates our extensible WFM evaluation toolkit with process-level inference strategies, including fast tokenization, probability-based Top-K pruning, and efficient beam search. Empirical results on the COSMOS model demonstrate that test-time scaling exists even in a compute-optimal way. Our findings reveal that test-time scaling laws hold for WFMs and that SWIFT provides a scalable and effective pathway for improving WFM inference without retraining or increasing model size. Project page: https://scalingwfm.github.io/.