# StateSpaceDiffuser: Bringing Long Context to Diffusion World Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22246/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 80 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [Video-generation world models and simulators](https://mlsanity.com/wm/video-generation-world-models-and-simulators/)
- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13036/) (2026)
- [LoViC: Efficient Long Video Generation with Context Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12952/) (2025)
- [EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06218/) (2025)
- [Exo2EgoSyn: Unlocking Foundation Video Generation Models for Exocentric-to-Egocentric Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20186/) (2025)
- [AnchorWeave: World-Consistent Video Generation with Retrieved Local Spatial Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14941/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Aware Implicit Memory for Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02436/) (2026)
- [Mode Seeking meets Mean Seeking for Fast Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24289/) (2026)
- [Flow Equivariant World Models: Memory for Partially Observed Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01075/) (2026)
- [Counterfactual World Models via Digital Twin-conditioned Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17481/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14076/) (2026)
- [Composition of Memory Experts for Diffusion World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18813/) (2026)
- [World Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Methodologies, Reasoning Paradigms, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00133/) (2026)
- [On Memory: A comparison of memory mechanisms in world models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06983/) (2025)
- [Can Video World Models Track Unobserved World States?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30692/) (2026)
- [Reasmory: 3D Reconstruction as Explicit Memory for VLMs Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00963/) (2026)
- [Spatial Memory Intelligence: Endowing World Models with Understanding-Driven Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02521/) (2026)
- [Long-horizon Video Generation with Slot Memory Addressed By Region Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19257/) (2026)
- [StateCraft: Augmenting Video World Models with Abstract-State Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19795/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World models have recently gained prominence for action-conditioned visual prediction in complex environments. However, relying on only a few recent observations causes them to lose long-term context. Consequently, within a few steps, the generated scenes drift from what was previously observed, undermining temporal coherence. This limitation, common in state-of-the-art world models, which are diffusion-based, stems from the lack of a lasting environment state. To address this problem, we introduce StateSpaceDiffuser, where a diffusion model is enabled to perform long-context tasks by integrating features from a state-space model, representing the entire interaction history. This design restores long-term memory while preserving the high-fidelity synthesis of diffusion models. To rigorously measure temporal consistency, we develop an evaluation protocol that probes a model's ability to reinstantiate seen content in extended rollouts. Comprehensive experiments show that StateSpaceDiffuser significantly outperforms a strong diffusion-only baseline, maintaining a coherent visual context for an order of magnitude more steps. It delivers consistent views in both a 2D maze navigation and a complex 3D environment. These results establish that bringing state-space representations into diffusion models is highly effective in demonstrating both visual details and long-term memory. Project page: https://insait-institute.github.io/StateSpaceDiffuser/.