Wonder: Video World Model Done Better
On the map: World models → Video-generation world models and simulators
Abstract (arXiv)
We present Wonder, a general-purpose video world model for real-time, camera-controllable world exploration. Given an image or a conditional video, Wonder constructs a playable world where users can navigate interactively by moving the camera, discovering unseen regions, and revisiting previously observed areas in real time and over a long-term horizon. Achieving this capability requires a system-level co-design of control method, memory mechanism, and training strategy. We introduce a novel camera conditioning with a dense coordinate field whose renderings provide spatially aligned motion and orientation cues, allowing the model to interpret camera motion directly as visual evidence. To support fast and precise memory retrieval over a growing generation context, we propose an efficient sparse attention-based memory mechanism, enabling the model to selectively attend to a small set of relevant context tokens at inference time, regardless of actual context length. We further develop several techniques to rectify the self-forcing-style distillation pipeline, improving the student model's ability to respect control signals, as well as maintaining diverse generation modes and long-term memory from the teacher. Together, these components enable Wonder to synthesize diverse, minute-scale videos at 16 FPS while preserving coherent geometry, appearance, and dynamics across long rollouts. Beyond image-to-video generation, Wonder naturally supports video-conditioned generation, allowing existing dynamic scenes to be re-shot in real time.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 46 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.
Builds on
46 of 50 references.
Closest ancestors · 14
Same direction, newest first
- 2026DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model15 Jun
- 2026SANA-WM: Efficient Minute-Scale World Modeling with Hybrid Linear Diffusion Transformer14 May
- 2026Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory10 Apr
- 2026INSPATIO-WORLD: A Real-Time 4D World Simulator via Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Modeling8 Apr
- 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan
- 2025RELIC: Interactive Video World Model with Long-Horizon Memory3 Dec
- 2025Hunyuan-GameCraft-2: Instruction-following Interactive Game World Model28 Nov
- 2025Memory Forcing: Spatio-Temporal Memory for Consistent Scene Generation on Minecraft3 Oct
- 2025Rolling Forcing: Autoregressive Long Video Diffusion in Real Time29 Sep
- 2025Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model18 Aug
- 2025Yume: An Interactive World Generation Model23 Jul
- 2025MineWorld: a Real-Time and Open-Source Interactive World Model on Minecraft11 Apr
2 more
Other references · 32
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2023Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinkscited by 2,115
- 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,755
- 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,597
- 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillationcited by 978
- 2024Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesiscited by 648
- 2023PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallelcited by 641
- 2024Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusioncited by 634
- 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 626
- 2023YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Modelscited by 584
- 2025Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusioncited by 569
- 2023MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generationcited by 568
20 more
- 2023DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Visioncited by 514
- 2024FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisioncited by 507
- 2024From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Modelscited by 401
- 2024ViewCrafter: Taming Video Diffusion Models for High-fidelity Novel View Synthesiscited by 392
- 2025ReCamMaster: Camera-Controlled Generative Rendering from A Single Videocited by 278
- 2026LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Modelcited by 213
- 2025Self-Forcing++: Towards Minute-Scale High-Quality Video Generationcited by 176
- 2025ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perceptioncited by 162
- 2026Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video Generationcited by 159
- 2025Context as Memory: Scene-Consistent Interactive Long Video Generation with Memory Retrievalcited by 157
- 2023UniMax: Fairer and more Effective Language Sampling for Large-Scale Multilingual Pretrainingcited by 147
- 2025Hunyuan-GameCraft: High-dynamic Interactive Game Video Generation with Hybrid History Conditioncited by 92
- 2025HunyuanWorld 1.0: Generating Immersive, Explorable, and Interactive 3D Worlds from Words or Pixelscited by 91
- 2025MotionStream: Real-Time Video Generation with Interactive Motion Controlscited by 71
- 2024Ca2-VDM: Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Model with Causal Generation and Cache Sharingcited by 70
- 2025World-Env: Leveraging World Model as a Virtual Environment for VLA Post-Trainingcited by 57
- 2024ACDiT: Interpolating Autoregressive Conditional Modeling and Diffusion Transformercited by 45
- 2025BulletTime: Decoupled Control of Time and Camera Pose for Video Generationcited by 12
- 2025SpaceTimePilot: Generative Rendering of Dynamic Scenes Across Space and Timecited by 9
- 2025FreeViS: Training-free Video Stylization with Inconsistent Referencescited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.
13 papers.
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- 2026Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Gamescited by 3
- 2026RECAP-Forcing: Retaining Content Appearances for Long Video Generationcited by 2
- 2026AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Videocited by 1
- 2026Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worldscited by 1
- 2026Oneira: From Open-Ended Generation to Open-World Interaction in Video World Modelscited by 1
- 2026World in World: Explore the World with World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modelingcited by 0
- 2026WorldPlay2: Extending Real-Time Interactive World Models in Control and Horizoncited by 0
- 2026Honeycomb: Constant-Size Scene Memory Representation for Video World Modelscited by 0
- 2026LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Memorizon: Training World Models Beyond Their Context Windowcited by 0
- 2026Learning to Retrieve: Internalizing Memory Retrieval for Video World Modelscited by 0
1 more
- 2026AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agentscited by 0
- 2026AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents8 Oct 2026
- 2026Learning to Retrieve: Internalizing Memory Retrieval for Video World Models8 Oct 2026
- 2026Oneira: From Open-Ended Generation to Open-World Interaction in Video World Models1 Oct 2026
- 2026Memorizon: Training World Models Beyond Their Context Window30 Sep 2026
- 2026LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Models30 Sep 2026
- 2026Honeycomb: Constant-Size Scene Memory Representation for Video World Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026WorldPlay2: Extending Real-Time Interactive World Models in Control and Horizon28 Sep 2026
- 2026Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worlds28 Sep 2026
- 2026Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modeling22 Sep 2026
- 2026AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Video13 Sep 2026
- 2026World in World: Explore the World with World Models10 Sep 2026
- 2026Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Games27 Aug 2026
1 more
- 2026AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Videocited by 1
- 2026Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worldscited by 1
- 2026Oneira: From Open-Ended Generation to Open-World Interaction in Video World Modelscited by 1
- 2026World in World: Explore the World with World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modelingcited by 0
- 2026WorldPlay2: Extending Real-Time Interactive World Models in Control and Horizoncited by 0
- 2026Honeycomb: Constant-Size Scene Memory Representation for Video World Modelscited by 0
- 2026LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Memorizon: Training World Models Beyond Their Context Windowcited by 0
- 2026Oneira: From Open-Ended Generation to Open-World Interaction in Video World Models1 Oct 2026
- 2026Memorizon: Training World Models Beyond Their Context Window30 Sep 2026
- 2026LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Models30 Sep 2026
- 2026Honeycomb: Constant-Size Scene Memory Representation for Video World Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026WorldPlay2: Extending Real-Time Interactive World Models in Control and Horizon28 Sep 2026
- 2026Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worlds28 Sep 2026
- 2026Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modeling22 Sep 2026
- 2026AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Video13 Sep 2026
- 2026World in World: Explore the World with World Models10 Sep 2026
- 2026AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents8 Oct 2026
- 2026Learning to Retrieve: Internalizing Memory Retrieval for Video World Models8 Oct 2026
- 2026Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Games27 Aug 2026
- 2026RECAP-Forcing: Retaining Content Appearances for Long Video Generation27 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026ReWorld: An Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory
- 2025Video World Models with Long-term Spatial Memory
- 2026Echo-Memory: A Controlled Study of Memory in Action World Models
- 2026MIND: Benchmarking Memory Consistency and Action Control in World Models
- 2026WorldKV: Efficient World Memory with World Retrieval and Compression
- 2024WorldDreamer: Towards General World Models for Video Generation via Predicting Masked Tokens
- 2026WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models
- 2026Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory