# Can Image Models Imagine Time? ImageTime: A Novel Benchmark for Probing Visual World Modeling Through Spatiotemporal Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10620 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10620/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 25 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 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, 25 of 25)

- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22699/) (2025)
- [How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02385/) (2024)
- [Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08261/) (2021)
- [VideoDirectorGPT: Consistent Multi-scene Video Generation via LLM-Guided Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15091/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) as a Generalist Evaluator for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01361/) (2023)
- [IntPhys: A Framework and Benchmark for Visual Intuitive Physics Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07616/) (2018)
- [TC-Bench: Benchmarking Temporal Compositionality in Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08656/) (2024)
- [DreamTuner: Single Image is Enough for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13691/) (2023)
- [PhyBench: A Physical Commonsense Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11802/) (2024)
- [StoryMaker: Towards Holistic Consistent Characters in Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12576/) (2024)
- [AutoStudio: Crafting Consistent Subjects in Multi-turn Interactive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01388/) (2024)
- [Story2Board: A Training-Free Approach for Expressive Storyboard Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09983/) (2025)
- [GIR-Bench: Versatile Benchmark for Generating Images with Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11026/) (2025)
- [Simulating the Visual World with Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08585/) (2025)
- [Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Evaluating State Evolution in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13215/) (2026)
- [WorldBench: Benchmarking Physical Understanding of World Models by Isolating Physics Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21282/) (2026)
- [ImagenWorld: Stress-Testing Image Generation Models with Explainable Human Evaluation on Open-ended Real-World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27862/) (2026)
- [DSH-Bench: A Difficulty- and Scenario-Aware Benchmark with Hierarchical Subject Taxonomy for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08090/) (2026)
- [VideoVerse: Does Your T2V Generator Have World Model Capability to Synthesize Videos?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08398/) (2025)
- [Envision: Benchmarking Unified Understanding & Generation for Causal World Process Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01816/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image generation models now produce high-quality static images, yet their ability to represent how a visual world changes over time remains poorly understood. Practical workflows such as storyboarding, step-by-step illustration, reference-guided editing, and video previsualization require models to preserve identities, objects, spatial relations, and causal order across multiple visual states. Existing evaluations largely measure single-image correctness, compositional alignment, or video quality, leaving open whether an image model can coherently imagine a temporally ordered process. We introduce ImageTime, a diagnostic benchmark that uses spatiotemporal consistency as a behavioral probe of visual world modeling in image generation. Given an action instruction, and optionally a reference image specifying the initial state, a model must generate one image containing four ordered key states: initial state, action onset, transition state, and final state. This four-keyframe protocol is more temporally demanding than single-image generation while avoiding the confounds of dense video dynamics. ImageTime organizes tasks with a progressive capability hierarchy and decomposes each scenario into stage-wise state predicates, cross-frame temporal constraints, and forbidden causal violations. GPT-5.5 scores all generated images under a structured VLM-as-judge protocol, producing interpretable capability scores, diagnostic subscores, and failure labels. Through multi-family benchmarking, ImageTime reveals where current image generation systems succeed, fail, and drift when asked to maintain coherent visual world states over time.