mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

WorldDirector: Building Controllable World Simulators with Persistent Dynamic Memory

arXiv 2607.02517 ↗First posted 2 Jul 2026cs.CVcited by 5

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

  1. 2026Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: Hybrid Memory for Dynamic Video World Models26 Mar
  2. 2026LiveWorld: Simulating Out-of-Sight Dynamics in Generative Video World Models7 Mar
  3. 2026Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory2 Feb
  4. 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan
  5. 2025WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling16 Dec
  6. 2025RELIC: Interactive Video World Model with Long-Horizon Memory3 Dec
  7. 2025Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model18 Aug
  8. 2025Yume: An Interactive World Generation Model23 Jul
  9. 2025WorldMem: Long-term Consistent World Simulation with Memory16 Apr
  10. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models26 Mar
  11. 2024GameGen-X: Interactive Open-world Game Video Generation1 Nov
  12. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators23 Oct
4 more
  1. 2024StreamingT2V: Consistent, Dynamic, and Extendable Long Video Generation from Text21 Mar
  2. 2024Genie: Generative Interactive Environments23 Feb
  3. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets25 Nov
  4. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modeling6 Oct

Other references · 34

  1. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  3. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
  4. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  5. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,822
  6. 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,422
  7. 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,351
  8. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  9. 2023GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generationcited by 781
  10. 2023MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generationcited by 580
  11. 2024Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Videocited by 531
  12. 2023VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generationcited by 492
22 more
  1. 2019CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoningcited by 484
  2. 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 479
  3. 2024CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 460
  4. 2024Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generationcited by 455
  5. 2023ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generationcited by 327
  6. 2024Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Ataricited by 300
  7. 2023DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectorycited by 264
  8. 2023SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Predictioncited by 233
  9. 2023FreeNoise: Tuning-Free Longer Video Diffusion via Noise Reschedulingcited by 180
  10. 2024Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectoriescited by 178
  11. 2024Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generationcited by 164
  12. 2025Context as Memory: Scene-Consistent Interactive Long Video Generation with Memory Retrievalcited by 163
  13. 2024DragAnything: Motion Control for Anything using Entity Representationcited by 159
  14. 2019PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoningcited by 137
  15. 2025VMem: Consistent Interactive Video Scene Generation with Surfel-Indexed View Memorycited by 109
  16. 2024Boximator: Generating Rich and Controllable Motions for Video Synthesiscited by 107
  17. 2025Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Modelcited by 84
  18. 2025Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Datasetcited by 79
  19. 2025MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidancecited by 61
  20. 2025Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidancecited by 45
  21. 2024LeviTor: 3D Trajectory Oriented Image-to-Video Synthesiscited by 39
  22. 2025The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Textcited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Beyond Pixel Histories: World Models with Persistent 3D State
  2. 2024WorldDreamer: Towards General World Models for Video Generation via Predicting Masked Tokens
  3. 2026WorldWeave: Growing Persistent Geometric Worlds for Video Generation
  4. 2026DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model
  5. 2025VDAWorld: World Modelling via VLM-Directed Abstraction and Simulation
  6. 20264Director: Controlling Video World Models with Rigid 3D Geometry
  7. 2026VerseCrafter: Dynamic Realistic Video World Model with 4D Geometric Control
  8. 2026WorldCrafter: Consistent Video World Model with Implicit 3D-aware Memory