Diagnosing Under-Development of Irreversible Processes in Video Generation

Many physical attributes are irreversible: ice melts but does not re-freeze, paper chars but does not un-burn. Do video generators respect this? We show the question is hard to measure, and that what can be measured reliably is development rather than reversal. Metrics of local reversal are null-degenerate: a per-clip violation rate scores 0.50 on pure noise, and a variance-normalized reversal residual sits at its noise ceiling. What survives null-testing is a two-part protocol: progress (a directional attribute correlation) and a stasis rate. Under this protocol, generated video separates cleanly from real footage, and the gap is human-validated. Across seven text-to-video models, real reference footage advances (ρ=+0.40, 35% static) while every generator shows near-zero progress and 92--100% stasis; nine annotators rate real footage far above generated (2.75 vs. 0.99 on a 0--4 scale). The reliable finding is under-development: generators barely advance irreversible attributes rather than reversing them. As a complementary mechanism, we show that post-hoc readout guidance is gameable, whereas enforcing monotonicity by construction in a disentangled attribute latent removes the gameable readout, validated in controlled and semi-synthetic settings.