WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction
On the map: World models → Latent predictive world models
Abstract (arXiv)
Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.
Key facts. Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Latent predictive world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 79 of its 105 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.
Builds on
79 of 105 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 58.
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50 newest of 67 All 67 (JSON)
- 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 167
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- 2026MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Modelscited by 23
- 2026RoboWM-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating World Models in Robotic Manipulationcited by 19
- 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulationcited by 19
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12 most cited of 56 All 56 (JSON)
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- 2026TrAct: Bridging Robot Control and Visual Prediction with Visual Tracks25 Aug 2026
- 2026From Generation to Simulation: How Far Are World Models from Being True Simulators?24 Aug 2026
- 2026LAWM-3D: Learning 3D-Aware Latent Actions from Human Videos for Generalizable Robot World Models6 Aug 2026
- 2026SC2-WM: A Self-Correcting World Model with Closed-Loop Feedback for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments1 Aug 2026
- 2026BWM: A Low-Cost High-Fidelity World Simulator for Robot Learning31 Jul 2026
- 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation24 Jul 2026
- 2026KineBench: Benchmarking Embodied World Models via IDM-Free Kinematic Grounding22 Jul 2026
- 2026PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration18 Jul 2026
- 2026WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Time8 Jul 2026
12 newest of 56 All 56 (JSON)
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- 2025TiViBench: Benchmarking Think-in-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Models17 Nov 2025
- 2025Seeing Across Views: Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning of Vision-Language Models in Robotic Scenes22 Oct 2025
- 2026PhysisForcing: Physics Reinforced World Simulator for Robotic Manipulationcited by 10
- 2026Pelican-Unify 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Actioncited by 8
- 2026From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulationcited by 2
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- 2026Pelican-Unify 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Action14 May 2026
- 2026RoboEvolve: Co-Evolving Planner-Simulator for Robotic Manipulation with Limited Data13 May 2026
- 2026From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulation12 May 2026
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