# PhiZero: A World Model Built Around Physical Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28624 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28624/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 93 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 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 93)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06669/) (2025)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13030/) (2025)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [Moments in Time Dataset: one million videos for event understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03150/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Beyond Multimodal Alignment: Certifying Physical Language through Response Substitution and Ordered Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19492/) (2026)
- [Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40358/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce PhiZero, a physical world model built around physical language, a compact discrete representation of world-state transitions. Existing physical world models typically predict future videos directly in pixel space, leaving the underlying world dynamics implicit within high-dimensional visual predictors. Motivated by humans' ability to abstract predictive structure from visual experience and organize it in natural language for explicit reasoning, we learn physical language from in-the-wild videos through self-supervision and use it to explicitly reason about how the physical world evolves. Accordingly, PhiZero adopts a reason-then-render paradigm: it first infers future world evolution as a physical-language sequence and then renders the inferred transitions into videos. Extensive experiments across generation and understanding benchmarks validate the ability of PhiZero to model physically coherent world evolution. We further show its potential for realistic and interactive world modeling, fine-grained action-conditioned simulation, and zero-shot motion transfer.