# Nano World Models: A Minimalist Implementation of Future Video Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 56 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 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 56)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04983/) (2024)
- [Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08891/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching Guide and Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06264/) (2024)
- [Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12399/) (2024)
- [LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19312/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38163/) (2026)
- [From Generation to Simulation: How Far Are World Models from Being True Simulators?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23070/) (2026)
- [AcrossVAM1.0: Particle World Modeling for Text-Assisted Robot Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28491/) (2026)
- [FINE: Future-Informed Navigation Encoding for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32855/) (2026)
- [Modeling Latent Disturbances for Robust Decision-Making in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07599/) (2026)

## 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.