The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Text
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present WorldCanvas, a framework for promptable world events that enables rich, user-directed simulation by combining text, trajectories, and reference images. Unlike text-only approaches and existing trajectory-controlled image-to-video methods, our multimodal approach combines trajectories -- encoding motion, timing, and visibility -- with natural language for semantic intent and reference images for visual grounding of object identity, enabling the generation of coherent, controllable events that include multi-agent interactions, object entry/exit, reference-guided appearance and counterintuitive events. The resulting videos demonstrate not only temporal coherence but also emergent consistency, preserving object identity and scene despite temporary disappearance. By supporting expressive world events generation, WorldCanvas advances world models from passive predictors to interactive, user-shaped simulators. Our project page is available at: https://worldcanvas.github.io/.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.
Builds on
44 of 47 references.
References · 44
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32 more
- 2023I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Modelscited by 350
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- 2024How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspectivecited by 212
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- 2024Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectoriescited by 178
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026Advancing Open-source World Modelscited by 154
- 2026WorldDirector: Building Controllable World Simulators with Persistent Dynamic Memorycited by 5
- 2026Composing Driving Worlds through Disentangled Control for Adversarial Scenario Generationcited by 2
- 2026MoWorld: A Flash World Modelcited by 2
- 2026HECTOR: Hybrid Editable Compositional Object References for Video Generationcited by 0
- 2026FlexComposer: Unified Video Compositing from Images to Dynamic Footage with Flexible Trajectory Controlcited by 0
- 2026DiVA: Enabling Interactive Digital Life Simulation via Video Modelscited by 0
- 2026DiVA: Enabling Interactive Digital Life Simulation via Video Models12 Sep 2026
- 2026FlexComposer: Unified Video Compositing from Images to Dynamic Footage with Flexible Trajectory Control31 Jul 2026
- 2026MoWorld: A Flash World Model7 Jul 2026
- 2026WorldDirector: Building Controllable World Simulators with Persistent Dynamic Memory2 Jul 2026
- 2026Composing Driving Worlds through Disentangled Control for Adversarial Scenario Generation13 Mar 2026
- 2026HECTOR: Hybrid Editable Compositional Object References for Video Generation9 Mar 2026
- 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2024WorldDreamer: Towards General World Models for Video Generation via Predicting Masked Tokens
- 2026WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models
- 2025Simulating the Visual World with Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap
- 2026Towards Interactive Video World Modeling: Frontiers, Challenges, Benchmarks, and Future Trends
- 2026Can Image Models Imagine Time? ImageTime: A Novel Benchmark for Probing Visual World Modeling Through Spatiotemporal Consistency
- 2026WorldCast: Exploring Intelligent Visual Generation in World State Prediction
- 2026WorldCraft: From Camera Navigation to Object Manipulation in Interactive Video World Models
- 2026Video-Arena: A Scalable Agentic Video Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Capability