# WorldReasonBench: Human-Aligned Stress Testing of Video Generators as Future World-State Predictors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10434/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and multimodal model alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 23 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11440/) (2023)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20328/) (2025)
- [How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02385/) (2024)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)
- [Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05363/) (2024)
- [FETV: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Open-Domain Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01813/) (2023)
- [VideoScore2: Think before You Score in Generative Video Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22799/) (2025)
- [A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20159/) (2026)
- [V-ReasonBench: Toward Unified Reasoning Benchmark Suite for Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16668/) (2025)
- [VideoEval-Pro: Robust and Realistic Long Video Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14640/) (2025)
- [Can World Simulators Reason? Gen-ViRe: A Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13853/) (2025)
- [RULER-Bench: Probing Rule-based Reasoning Abilities of Next-level Video Generation Models for Vision Foundation Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02622/) (2025)
- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Definition and Roadmap for World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06401/) (2026)
- [WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02603/) (2026)
- [VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19583/) (2026)
- [Do Video Generators Track the World Across Segments? A Benchmark and Method for World-State Reasoning in Video Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03673/) (2026)
- [SCOPE: Score-Isolated Agentic Optimization for Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15043/) (2026)
- [OmniCapBench: A Deep-Structured Evaluation Framework for Fine-Grained Audio-Visual Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12458/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Commercial video generation systems such as Seedance2.0 and Veo3.1 have rapidly improved, strengthening the view that video generators may be evolving into "world simulators." Yet the community still lacks a benchmark that directly tests whether a model can reason about how an observed world should evolve over time. We introduce WorldReasonBench, which reframes video generation evaluation as world-state prediction: given an initial state and an action, can a model generate a future video whose state evolution remains physically, socially, logically, and informationally consistent? WorldReasonBench contains 436 curated test cases with structured ground-truth QA annotations spanning four reasoning dimensions and 22 subcategories. We evaluate generated videos with a human-aligned two-part methodology: Process-aware Reasoning Verification uses structured QA and reasoning-phase diagnostics to detect temporal and causal failures, while Multi-dimensional Quality Assessment scores reasoning quality, temporal consistency, and visual aesthetics for ranking and reward modeling. We further introduce WorldRewardBench, a preference benchmark with approximately 6K expert-annotated pairs over 1.4K videos, supporting pair-wise and point-wise reward-model evaluation. Across modern video generators, our results expose a persistent gap between visual plausibility and world reasoning: videos can look convincing while failing dynamics, causality, or information preservation. We will release our benchmarks and evaluation toolkit to support community research on genuinely world-aware video generation at https://github.com/UniX-AI-Lab/WorldReasonBench/.