PEDRA: Evaluating the Realism of Pedestrian Dynamics in Video Generation

Pedestrian simulation traditionally relies on expert-tuned, hand-crafted models that limit scalability and generalization. Meanwhile, large-scale video generation models have achieved high visual realism across diverse settings, motivating exploration of their potential as general-purpose world simulators. Existing benchmarks primarily assess single-subject realism rather than scenes with multiple interacting people, leaving the plausibility of multi-agent dynamics in generated videos untested. We propose a rigorous evaluation protocol to benchmark text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models as implicit simulators of pedestrian dynamics. For I2V, we leverage start frames from established datasets to enable direct comparison with ground truth videos, while for T2V we design a prompt suite covering varied crowd densities and interaction types. A key component is a method to reconstruct 2D bird's-eye view trajectories from pixel-space without known camera parameters. Our analysis shows that leading models exhibit effective priors for plausible multi-agent behavior, though issues such as merging and disappearing pedestrians reveal limits to their physical consistency.