mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

WorldLens: Full-Spectrum Evaluations of Driving World Models in Real World

arXiv 2512.10958 ↗First posted 11 Dec 2025cs.CVcited by 23

On the map: World models → Video-generation world models and simulators

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Generative world models are reshaping embodied AI, enabling agents to synthesize realistic 4D driving environments that look convincing but often fail physically or behaviorally. Despite rapid progress, the field still lacks a unified way to assess whether generated worlds preserve geometry, obey physics, or support reliable control. We introduce WorldLens, a full-spectrum benchmark evaluating how well a model builds, understands, and behaves within its generated world. It spans five aspects -- Generation, Reconstruction, Action-Following, Downstream Task, and Human Preference -- jointly covering visual realism, geometric consistency, physical plausibility, and functional reliability. Across these dimensions, no existing world model excels universally: those with strong textures often violate physics, while geometry-stable ones lack behavioral fidelity. To align objective metrics with human judgment, we further construct WorldLens-26K, a large-scale dataset of human-annotated videos with numerical scores and textual rationales, and develop WorldLens-Agent, an evaluation model distilled from these annotations to enable scalable, explainable scoring. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for measuring world fidelity -- standardizing how future models are judged not only by how real they look, but by how real they behave.

Key facts. Cited by 23 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 44 of its 148 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2025.

Builds on

44 of 148 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Simulating the Visual World with Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap11 Nov
  2. 20253D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey4 Sep
  3. 2025MineWorld: a Real-Time and Open-Source Interactive World Model on Minecraft11 Apr
  4. 2025VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness27 Mar
  5. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer12 Aug
  6. 2021VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers20 Apr

Other references · 38

  1. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  2. 2017The Kinetics Human Action Video Datasetcited by 1,909
  3. 2022Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,778
  4. 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,234
  5. 2024Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Taskscited by 929
  6. 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 637
  7. 2025Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusioncited by 625
  8. 2021NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehiclescited by 493
  9. 2020Visual Transformers: Token-based Image Representation and Processing for Computer Visioncited by 334
  10. 2024How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspectivecited by 212
  11. 2025Self-Forcing++: Towards Minute-Scale High-Quality Video Generationcited by 192
  12. 2025GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 185
26 more
  1. 2025WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generationcited by 156
  2. 2024OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agentscited by 132
  3. 2023ADriver-I: A General World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 104
  4. 2023BEVControl: Accurately Controlling Street-view Elements with Multi-perspective Consistency via BEV Sketch Layoutcited by 102
  5. 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Surveycited by 98
  6. 2024DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformerscited by 96
  7. 2025Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Modelscited by 84
  8. 2025Vchitect-2.0: Parallel Transformer for Scaling Up Video Diffusion Modelscited by 60
  9. 2024VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 45
  10. 2024A Survey on Long Video Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Prospectscited by 40
  11. 2024DreamForge: Motion-Aware Autoregressive Video Generation for Multi-View Driving Scenescited by 35
  12. 2025VaViM and VaVAM: Autonomous Driving through Video Generative Modelingcited by 35
  13. 2025VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generationcited by 32
  14. 2024DiVE: DiT-based Video Generation with Enhanced Controlcited by 31
  15. 2024The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Conditioncited by 23
  16. 2025GeoDrive: 3D Geometry-Informed Driving World Model with Precise Action Controlcited by 19
  17. 2024A Survey of AI-Generated Video Evaluationcited by 17
  18. 2024ACT-Bench: Towards Action Controllable World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 14
  19. 2024Physical Informed Driving World Modelcited by 13
  20. 2025RepVideo: Rethinking Cross-Layer Representation for Video Generationcited by 12
  21. 2025ProphetDWM: A Driving World Model for Rolling Out Future Actions and Videoscited by 11
  22. 2025Four Principles for Physically Interpretable World Modelscited by 10
  23. 2025LongDWM: Cross-Granularity Distillation for Building a Long-Term Driving World Modelcited by 9
  24. 2025Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunitiescited by 7
  25. 2025DualDiff+: Dual-Branch Diffusion for High-Fidelity Video Generation with Reward Guidancecited by 6
  26. 2025Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via Implicit Residual World Modelscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 22.

23 papers.

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  1. 2026WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Modelscited by 76
  2. 2026WBench: A Comprehensive Multi-turn Benchmark for Interactive Video World Model Evaluationcited by 39
  3. 2026Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representationcited by 13
  4. 2026Language-Conditioned World Modeling for Visual Navigationcited by 10
  5. 2026WorldRoamBench: An Open-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Stability of Interactive World Modelscited by 10
  6. 2026Is Your Driving World Model an All-Around Player?cited by 6
  7. 2026SPIRAL: Self-Evolving Action-Conditioned Video Generation via Reflective Planning Agentscited by 5
  8. 2026MME-CoF-Pro: Evaluating Reasoning Coherence in Video Generative Models with Text and Visual Hintscited by 5
  9. 2026CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 5
  10. 2025Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systemscited by 4
  11. 2026IRIS: A Real-World Benchmark for Inverse Recovery and Identification of Physical Dynamic Systems from Monocular Videocited by 4
  12. 2026From Articulated Kinematics to Routed Visual Control for Action-Conditioned Surgical Video Generationcited by 4
11 more
  1. 2026WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivitycited by 4
  2. 2026World Models as Group Actionscited by 3
  3. 2026OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generationcited by 2
  4. 2026StressDream: Steering Video World Models for Robust Policy Evaluation and Improvementcited by 1
  5. 2026Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, Geometry-Grounded Weather Video Synthesiscited by 1
  6. 2026OccDirector: Language-Guided Behavior and Interaction Generation in 4D Occupancy Spacecited by 0
  7. 2026SPVC: Structured and Panoptic Video Fixing for Cross-Dataset Driving Scene Renderingcited by 0
  8. 2026DreamStream: Towards Policy-Oriented Generative Simulation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 0
  9. 2026VehDyn: A Driving World Model Benchmark for Vehicle Dynamicscited by 0
  10. 2026CRISP: Fixing Flying Pixels in Latent LiDAR Generation via Diffusion Decodingcited by 0
  11. 2026VITAL: From Visual Motion to Precise Actioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop World
  2. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI
  3. 2026HappyWorld-Bench
  4. 2026Wow, wo, val! A Comprehensive Embodied World Model Evaluation Turing Test
  5. 2026PlayWorld: Benchmarking World Models with Agent Players over Long-Horizon Objectives
  6. 2026From Generative Engines to Actionable Simulators: The Imperative of Physical Grounding in World Models
  7. 2026Video2World: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Interactive World Modeling from Embodied Videos
  8. 2025WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction