# ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17730/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 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 45 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 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, 30 of 45)

- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14837/) (2024)
- [Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02792/) (2025)
- [LCM-LoRA: A Universal Stable-Diffusion Acceleration Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05556/) (2023)
- [Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13009/) (2025)
- [GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20523/) (2025)
- [Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02214/) (2026)
- [PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18964/) (2024)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02800/) (2026)
- [WonderJourney: Going from Anywhere to Everywhere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03884/) (2023)
- [Advancing Open-source World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20540/) (2026)
- [UniMax: Fairer and more Effective Language Sampling for Large-Scale Multilingual Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09151/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08316/) (2025)
- [MS-Diffusion: Multi-subject Zero-shot Image Personalization with Layout Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07209/) (2024)
- [WorldModelBench: Judging Video Generation Models As World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20694/) (2025)
- [Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08995/) (2026)
- [HunyuanWorld 1.0: Generating Immersive, Explorable, and Interactive 3D Worlds from Words or Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21809/) (2025)
- [Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22096/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Infinite Worlds with Versatile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07534/) (2026)
- [Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Brain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25927/) (2026)
- [Matrix-Game 3.5: Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Interactive World Models with Patch Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29910/) (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)
- [Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27168/) (2026)
- [AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16679/) (2026)
- [HelloWorld: Enabling Socially Interactive Characters in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05070/) (2026)
- [Oneira: From Open-Ended Generation to Open-World Interaction in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01614/) (2026)
- [From Generation to Simulation: How Far Are World Models from Being True Simulators?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23070/) (2026)
- [Structure-Token Evidence-Anchored Reasoning for Scientific Chart Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13267/) (2026)
- [Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26458/) (2026)
- [AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12374/) (2026)
- [PAWA: Panoramic Action-conditioned World Modeling for Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20240/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.