Nano World Models: A Minimalist Implementation of Future Video Prediction
On the map: World models → Video-generation world models and simulators
Abstract (arXiv)
World models have become a central paradigm for learning predictive simulators that support generation, planning, and decision-making. Yet, despite rapid progress in industry-scale interactive video generation, the broader research community still lacks compact, reproducible, and easily extensible implementations for studying the design choices underlying modern world models. We introduce Nano World Models, a minimalist codebase for future video prediction centered around diffusion forcing. Nano World Models provides a unified interface for generative objectives, model scales, action-conditioning mechanisms, latent observation spaces, datasets, evaluation protocols, and long-horizon rollout procedures. This design enables controlled studies of world-modeling components that are often entangled across separate implementations. Through experiments across simple control environments, game simulation, and real-robot data, we examine how prediction parameterization, architecture scale, action injection, sampling budget, and domain complexity affect video prediction quality and autoregressive rollout behavior. By releasing code, configurations, evaluation scripts, and pretrained checkpoints, Nano World Models aims to provide a compact yet extensible experimental substrate for open, reproducible, and scientific world-model research.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 56 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.
Builds on
56 of 63 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Solaris: Building a Multiplayer Video World Model in Minecraft25 Feb
- 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan
- 2025Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Video6 Nov
- 2025Vid2World: Crafting Video Diffusion Models to Interactive World Models20 May
- 2024Genie: Generative Interactive Environments23 Feb
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets25 Nov
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers19 Dec
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modeling6 Oct
Other references · 48
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- 2022Video Diffusion Modelscited by 2,280
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- 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,204
- 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,107
36 more
- 2018DeepMind Control Suitecited by 935
- 2018Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolutioncited by 761
- 2024SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformerscited by 707
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- 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 626
- 2025Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusioncited by 569
- 2024Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generationcited by 536
- 2024Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Videocited by 490
- 2024DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planningcited by 357
- 2023Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawedcited by 308
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- 2024Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Modelcited by 107
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- 2025TesserAct: Learning 4D Embodied World Modelscited by 90
- 2026PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulationcited by 74
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- 2025World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop Worldcited by 44
- 2026Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worldscited by 36
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- 2026Reconstruction or Semantics? What Makes a Latent Space Useful for Robotic World Modelscited by 21
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- 2025Jasmine: A Simple, Performant and Scalable JAX-based World Modeling Codebasecited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
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- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modelingcited by 0
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling29 Sep 2026
- 2026FINE: Future-Informed Navigation Encoding for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation26 Sep 2026
- 2026AcrossVAM1.0: Particle World Modeling for Text-Assisted Robot Video Prediction28 Aug 2026
- 2026From Generation to Simulation: How Far Are World Models from Being True Simulators?24 Aug 2026
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