Enhancing Physical Plausibility in Video Generation by Reasoning the Implausibility
On the map: Diffusion models → Video generation
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion models can generate realistic videos, but existing methods rely on implicitly learning physical reasoning from large-scale text-video datasets, which is costly, difficult to scale, and still prone to producing implausible motions that violate fundamental physical laws. We introduce a training-free framework that improves physical plausibility at inference time by explicitly reasoning about implausibility and guiding the generation away from it. Specifically, we employ a lightweight physics-aware reasoning pipeline to construct counterfactual prompts that deliberately encode physics-violating behaviors. Then, we propose a novel Synchronized Decoupled Guidance (SDG) strategy, which leverages these prompts through synchronized directional normalization to counteract lagged suppression and trajectory-decoupled denoising to mitigate cumulative trajectory bias, ensuring that implausible content is suppressed immediately and consistently throughout denoising. Experiments across different physical domains show that our approach substantially enhances physical fidelity while maintaining photorealism, despite requiring no additional training. Ablation studies confirm the complementary effectiveness of both the physics-aware reasoning component and SDG. In particular, the aforementioned two designs of SDG are also individually validated to contribute critically to the suppression of implausible content and the overall gains in physical plausibility. This establishes a new and plug-and-play physics-aware paradigm for video generation.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 43 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.
Builds on
43 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 15
Same direction, newest first
- 2025VideoREPA: Learning Physics for Video Generation through Relational Alignment with Foundation Models29 May
- 2025VLIPP: Towards Physically Plausible Video Generation with Vision and Language Informed Physical Prior30 Mar
- 2025PISA Experiments: Exploring Physics Post-Training for Video Diffusion Models by Watching Stuff Drop12 Mar
- 2025Vchitect-2.0: Parallel Transformer for Scaling Up Video Diffusion Models14 Jan
- 2024PhyT2V: LLM-Guided Iterative Self-Refinement for Physics-Grounded Text-to-Video Generation30 Nov
- 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer12 Aug
- 2024Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation31 Jul
- 2024MotionCraft: Physics-based Zero-Shot Video Generation22 May
- 2024VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models17 Jan
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets25 Nov
- 2023LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Models26 Sep
- 2023ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report12 Aug
3 more
Other references · 28
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
- 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
- 2022Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Datacited by 1,725
- 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,597
- 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 833
- 2024Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for Allcited by 637
- 2025GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Controlcited by 325
16 more
- 2023Emu Video: Factorizing Text-to-Video Generation by Explicit Image Conditioningcited by 254
- 2024PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generationcited by 169
- 2024Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generationcited by 167
- 2025Step-Video-T2V Technical Report: The Practice, Challenges, and Future of Video Foundation Modelcited by 163
- 2025Do generative video models understand physical principles?cited by 151
- 2025VideoPhy-2: A Challenging Action-Centric Physical Commonsense Evaluation in Video Generationcited by 141
- 2025WISA: World Simulator Assistant for Physics-Aware Text-to-Video Generationcited by 87
- 2022Differentiable Physics Simulation of Dynamics-Augmented Neural Objectscited by 45
- 2025PhysAnimator: Physics-Guided Generative Cartoon Animationcited by 40
- 2025Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Surveycited by 24
- 2025Hierarchical Fine-grained Preference Optimization for Physically Plausible Video Generationcited by 20
- 2024Exploring Local Memorization in Diffusion Models via Bright Ending Attentioncited by 19
- 2025Reasoning Physical Video Generation with Diffusion Timestep Tokens via Reinforcement Learningcited by 17
- 2025Synthetic Video Enhances Physical Fidelity in Video Synthesiscited by 15
- 2025Towards Physical Understanding in Video Generation: A 3D Point Regularization Approachcited by 8
- 2025LLM-to-Phy3D: Physically Conform Online 3D Object Generation with LLMscited by 4
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 10.
13 papers.
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- 2025Planning with Sketch-Guided Verification for Physics-Aware Video Generationcited by 6
- 2026Chain of Event-Centric Causal Thought for Physically Plausible Video Generationcited by 6
- 2026PhysVid: Physics Aware Local Conditioning for Generative Video Modelscited by 5
- 2025ChronoDreamer: Action-Conditioned World Model as an Online Simulator for Robotic Planningcited by 4
- 2026When Physical Preferences Meet Semantic Constraints: Physical and Semantic Direct Preference Optimization for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 3
- 2025LINA: Learning INterventions Adaptively for Physical Alignment and Generalization in Diffusion Modelscited by 1
- 2026Physics Question Scene Graph: Fine-grained Evaluation of Physical Plausibility in Text-to-Video Generationcited by 1
- 2026Distilling Physical Priors into Streaming World Modelscited by 1
- 2026Physics-Aware Video Generation via Agentic Planning and Graph-Guided Optimizationcited by 1
- 2026PhysRAG: Enhancing Physics-Awareness in Video Generation via Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 0
- 2026Physically Plausible Video Generation via Visual-Semantic Chain-of-Events Conditioningcited by 0
- 2026ThinkV2V: Unleashing the Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for Instruction-Guided Video Editingcited by 0
- 2026Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World Model30 Sep 2026
- 2026ThinkV2V: Unleashing the Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for Instruction-Guided Video Editing29 Sep 2026
- 2026Physically Plausible Video Generation via Visual-Semantic Chain-of-Events Conditioning1 Sep 2026
- 2026Distilling Physical Priors into Streaming World Models8 Aug 2026
- 2026When Physical Preferences Meet Semantic Constraints: Physical and Semantic Direct Preference Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation18 Jul 2026
- 2026Physics-Aware Video Generation via Agentic Planning and Graph-Guided Optimization16 Jul 2026
- 2026PhysRAG: Enhancing Physics-Awareness in Video Generation via Retrieval-Augmented Generation25 Jun 2026
- 2026Physics Question Scene Graph: Fine-grained Evaluation of Physical Plausibility in Text-to-Video Generation24 Jun 2026
- 2026PhysVid: Physics Aware Local Conditioning for Generative Video Models27 Mar 2026
- 2026Chain of Event-Centric Causal Thought for Physically Plausible Video Generation10 Mar 2026
- 2025ChronoDreamer: Action-Conditioned World Model as an Online Simulator for Robotic Planning21 Dec 2025
- 2025LINA: Learning INterventions Adaptively for Physical Alignment and Generalization in Diffusion Models15 Dec 2025
1 more
- 2025Planning with Sketch-Guided Verification for Physics-Aware Video Generationcited by 6
- 2026PhysVid: Physics Aware Local Conditioning for Generative Video Modelscited by 5
- 2026Physics Question Scene Graph: Fine-grained Evaluation of Physical Plausibility in Text-to-Video Generationcited by 1
- 2026Physically Plausible Video Generation via Visual-Semantic Chain-of-Events Conditioningcited by 0
- 2026Physically Plausible Video Generation via Visual-Semantic Chain-of-Events Conditioning1 Sep 2026
- 2026Physics Question Scene Graph: Fine-grained Evaluation of Physical Plausibility in Text-to-Video Generation24 Jun 2026
- 2026PhysVid: Physics Aware Local Conditioning for Generative Video Models27 Mar 2026
- 2025Planning with Sketch-Guided Verification for Physics-Aware Video Generation21 Nov 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025TRAVL: A Recipe for Making Video-Language Models Better Judges of Physics Implausibility
- 2026CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation
- 2026Seeking Physics in Diffusion Noise
- 2026PhysMRV: Physical Memory Retrieval and Verification for Physics Plausibility Reasoning
- 2025LikePhys: Evaluating Intuitive Physics Understanding in Video Diffusion Models via Likelihood Preference
- 2026Inference-time Physics Alignment of Video Generative Models with Latent World Models
- 2025Think Before You Diffuse: Infusing Physical Rules into Video Diffusion
- 2025PhyDetEx: Detecting and Explaining the Physical Plausibility of T2V Models