WorldDirector: Building Controllable World Simulators with Persistent Dynamic Memory
On the map: World models → Video-generation world models and simulators
Abstract (arXiv)
We present WorldDirector, a highly controllable video world model framework designed for persistent dynamic object memory and unrestricted viewpoint exploration. Unlike existing world models that entangle physical dynamics with pixel rendering and rely on continuous visual observation to sustain motion, our framework explicitly decouples semantic motion orchestration from visual generation. By leveraging an LLM to coordinate 3D trajectories with camera movements and subsequently employing these orchestrated trajectories as control signals for video generation, our approach ensures strict physical logic and appearance stability, successfully preserving the exact visual identities of dynamic entities even when they re-enter the scene after prolonged periods out of view. Experimental results demonstrate that our method supports the synthesis of complex and extended events with unprecedented controllability and persistent dynamic object memory. Project Page: https://worlddirector.github.io/
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 50 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.
Builds on
50 of 53 references.
Closest ancestors · 16
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: Hybrid Memory for Dynamic Video World Models26 Mar
- 2026LiveWorld: Simulating Out-of-Sight Dynamics in Generative Video World Models7 Mar
- 2026Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory2 Feb
- 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan
- 2025WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling16 Dec
- 2025RELIC: Interactive Video World Model with Long-Horizon Memory3 Dec
- 2025Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model18 Aug
- 2025Yume: An Interactive World Generation Model23 Jul
- 2025WorldMem: Long-term Consistent World Simulation with Memory16 Apr
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models26 Mar
- 2024GameGen-X: Interactive Open-world Game Video Generation1 Nov
- 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators23 Oct
4 more
Other references · 34
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- 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,822
- 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,422
- 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,351
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
- 2023GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generationcited by 781
- 2023MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generationcited by 580
- 2024Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Videocited by 531
- 2023VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generationcited by 492
22 more
- 2019CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoningcited by 484
- 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 479
- 2024CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 460
- 2024Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generationcited by 455
- 2023ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generationcited by 327
- 2024Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Ataricited by 300
- 2023DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectorycited by 264
- 2023SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Predictioncited by 233
- 2023FreeNoise: Tuning-Free Longer Video Diffusion via Noise Reschedulingcited by 180
- 2024Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectoriescited by 178
- 2024Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generationcited by 164
- 2025Context as Memory: Scene-Consistent Interactive Long Video Generation with Memory Retrievalcited by 163
- 2024DragAnything: Motion Control for Anything using Entity Representationcited by 159
- 2019PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoningcited by 137
- 2025VMem: Consistent Interactive Video Scene Generation with Surfel-Indexed View Memorycited by 109
- 2024Boximator: Generating Rich and Controllable Motions for Video Synthesiscited by 107
- 2025Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Modelcited by 84
- 2025Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Datasetcited by 79
- 2025MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidancecited by 61
- 2025Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidancecited by 45
- 2024LeviTor: 3D Trajectory Oriented Image-to-Video Synthesiscited by 39
- 2025The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Textcited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026Infinite Worlds with Versatile Interactionscited by 48
- 2026Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Braincited by 14
- 2026Matrix-Game 3.5: Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Interactive World Models with Patch Memorycited by 9
- 2026World Observer: Joint Actor-Observer Generation for Persistent World Modelingcited by 0
- 2026StateCraft: Augmenting Video World Models with Abstract-State Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026StateCraft: Augmenting Video World Models with Abstract-State Reasoning14 Oct 2026
- 2026World Observer: Joint Actor-Observer Generation for Persistent World Modeling1 Oct 2026
- 2026Matrix-Game 3.5: Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Interactive World Models with Patch Memory30 Aug 2026
- 2026Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Brain26 Aug 2026
- 2026Infinite Worlds with Versatile Interactions8 Jul 2026
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