# What if? Emulative Simulation with World Models for Situated Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06445/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 105 of its 130 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for language agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-language-agents/)
- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [3D-VLA: A 3D Vision-Language-Action Generative World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09631/) (2024)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07474/) (2022)
- [Navigation World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03572/) (2024)
- [Self-Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21819/) (2024)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23661/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RHO: Robust Holistic OSM-Based Metric Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27758/) (2026)
- [EmbPASS: Towards Cross-Embodiment Open Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03248/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Situated reasoning often relies on active exploration, yet in many real-world scenarios such exploration is infeasible due to physical constraints of robots or safety concerns of visually impaired users. Given only a limited observation, can an agent mentally simulate a future trajectory toward a target situation and answer spatial what-if questions? We introduce WanderDream, the first large-scale dataset designed for the emulative simulation of mental exploration, enabling models to reason without active exploration. WanderDream-Gen comprises 15.8K panoramic videos across 1,088 real scenes from HM3D, ScanNet++, and real-world captures, depicting imagined trajectories from current viewpoints to target situations. WanderDream-QA contains 158K question-answer pairs, covering starting states, paths, and end states along each trajectory to comprehensively evaluate exploration-based reasoning. Extensive experiments with world models and MLLMs demonstrate (1) that mental exploration is essential for situated reasoning, (2) that world models achieve compelling performance on WanderDream-Gen, (3) that imagination substantially facilitates reasoning on WanderDream-QA, and (4) that WanderDream data exhibit remarkable transferability to real-world scenarios.