# Incantation: Natural Language as the Action Interface for Multi-Entity Video World Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 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 40 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Video-generation world models and simulators](https://mlsanity.com/wm/video-generation-world-models-and-simulators/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.3916/) (2014)
- [Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12399/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14837/) (2024)
- [LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22622/) (2025)
- [Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning: A Survey and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03902/) (2017)
- [Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13009/) (2025)
- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Advancing Open-source World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20540/) (2026)
- [GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08325/) (2025)
- [GameGen-X: Interactive Open-world Game Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00769/) (2024)
- [LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16137/) (2023)
- [MineWorld: a Real-Time and Open-Source Interactive World Model on Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08388/) (2025)
- [The Matrix: Infinite-Horizon World Generation with Real-Time Moving Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03568/) (2024)
- [Vid2World: Crafting Video Diffusion Models to Interactive World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14357/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan-GameCraft-2: Instruction-following Interactive Game World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23429/) (2025)
- [Solaris: Building a Multiplayer Video World Model in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22208/) (2026)
- [Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02393/) (2026)
- [AVID: Adapting Video Diffusion Models to World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12822/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [StatePlay: State-Aware Game World Models for Mechanics-Consistent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26754/) (2026)
- [Marionette: Predicting World States, Rendering Geometry, Painting Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14530/) (2026)
- [From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14076/) (2026)
- [H3-World: Turning Language Understanding into World Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01560/) (2026)
- [WorldMind: Decoupled Game World Model for State-Aware NPC Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21439/) (2026)
- [AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16679/) (2026)
- [ShadowDancer: Teaching Video World Models Any Action by Learning Unified Dynamics Representations from a Video and Its Shadow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28362/) (2026)
- [GameDirector: Decoupling Gameplay Logic from Rendering for Player-Configurable Game World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25652/) (2026)
- [Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26458/) (2026)
- [CoDrive: Cross-Vehicle World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Trajectory Control for Cooperative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern interactive video world models have achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet lack fine-grained multi-entity control and cross-entity, cross-world generalization. We trace this gap to the action interface: standard control protocols (e.g. animation IDs, device inputs, scene-level captions) bind action semantics to specific entities or engines at design time. We propose natural language as the interface to unlock expressiveness that no prior interface can achieve, and we present Incantation, the first interactive video world model with per-latent-frame (0.25 s) natural-language conditioning that supports simultaneous multi-entity control and concept-level cross-entity transfer beyond any fixed rendering pipeline. We pair a pretrained bidirectional video backbone with frame-local text cross-attention, and enable real-time long-horizon streaming through ODE-initialized Self-Forcing distillation with a RoPE-decoupled sliding KV-cache. We surpass the Action-Index baseline on cross-entity transfer (89% vs. 43%) and out-of-vocabulary prompts (90% vs. 0%), and our 2-step student sustains 19.7 FPS at 480p with stable FVD over 2-hour rollouts. We further apply the same architecture and training recipe to The King of Fighters, changing only the per-entity action vocabulary slots. We have released a preview subset of the Incantation dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhush/incantation-elden-ring-scenes, containing manually collected Elden Ring player-boss combat clips with structured action-oriented metadata. Larger-scale Elden Ring and KOF data will be released with the full project.