# Captain Safari: A World Engine with Pose-Aligned 3D Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [ViewCrafter: Taming Video Diffusion Models for High-fidelity Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02048/) (2024)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11795/) (2022)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [WonderWorld: Interactive 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09394/) (2024)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [CamCo: Camera-Controllable 3D-Consistent Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02509/) (2024)
- [Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21705/) (2024)
- [Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11539/) (2025)
- [Video World Models with Long-term Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05284/) (2025)
- [Training-free Camera Control for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10126/) (2024)
- [CamI2V: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15957/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Video Diffusion: Consistent Multi-video Generation with Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17414/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: Hybrid Memory for Dynamic Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25716/) (2026)
- [AnchorWeave: World-Consistent Video Generation with Retrieved Local Spatial Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14941/) (2026)
- [Prisma-World: Camera-Controllable Multi-Agent Video World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09507/) (2026)
- [Evolution of Video Generative Foundations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06339/) (2026)
- [PanoWorld: Real-World Panoramic Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09661/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World engines aim to synthesize long, 3D-consistent videos that support interactive exploration of a scene under user-controlled camera motion. However, existing systems struggle under aggressive 6-DoF trajectories and complex outdoor layouts: they lose long-range geometric coherence, deviate from the target path, or collapse into overly conservative motion. To this end, we introduce Captain Safari, a pose-conditioned world engine that generates videos by retrieving from a persistent world memory. Given a camera path, our method maintains a dynamic local memory and uses a retriever to fetch pose-aligned world tokens, which then condition video generation along the trajectory. This design enables the model to maintain stable 3D structure while accurately executing challenging camera maneuvers. To evaluate this setting, we curate OpenSafari, a new in-the-wild FPV dataset containing high-dynamic drone videos with verified camera trajectories, constructed through a multi-stage geometric and kinematic validation pipeline. Across video quality, 3D consistency, and trajectory following, Captain Safari substantially outperforms state-of-the-art camera-controlled generators. It reduces MEt3R from 0.3703 to 0.3690, improves AUC@30 from 0.181 to 0.200, and yields substantially lower FVD than all camera-controlled baselines. More importantly, in a 50-participant, 5-way human study where annotators select the best result among five anonymized models, 67.6% of preferences favor our method across all axes. Our results demonstrate that pose-conditioned world memory is a powerful mechanism for long-horizon, controllable video generation and provide OpenSafari as a challenging new benchmark for future world-engine research.