mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PlayWorld: Benchmarking World Models with Agent Players over Long-Horizon Objectives

arXiv 2608.13552 ↗First posted 13 Aug 2026cs.CVcited by 5

On the map: World models → Video-generation world models and simulators

Abstract (arXiv)

Video world models simulate future states conditioned on current observations and user actions. Recent systems have demonstrated impressive video consistency and action controllability over long sequences. However, fairly comparing these interactive models remains challenging. In practice, a human player typically evaluates a world model by pursuing long-horizon objectives through interaction. For example, a user may turn around 360 degrees to see whether the environment remains consistent, or walk into the water and inspect whether realistic water ripples are generated. The action sequence required to achieve the same objective may vary substantially between models, making fixed action-conditioned evaluation unsuitable for cross-model comparison. To address this, we employ multi-modal Agent Players to interact with world models toward specified long-horizon objectives. Building on this paradigm, we introduce PlayWorld, a benchmark providing 171 scenarios, each with a specified objective. To evaluate performance thoroughly, we assess models along four core dimensions: geometry consistency, interaction fidelity, out-of-sight evolution, and insight evolution. In addition, we incorporate basic ability metrics for video quality and controllability. Experiments across nine state-of-the-art world models reveal that current models remain unreliable on long-horizon interactive objectives, particularly in maintaining spatial consistency and persistent state evolution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kxding/PlayWorld.

Key facts. Cited by 5 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 35 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2026.

Builds on

35 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026WorldRoamBench: An Open-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Stability of Interactive World Models30 Jun
  2. 2026MemoBench: Benchmarking World Modeling in Dynamically Changing Environments25 Jun
  3. 2026WBench: A Comprehensive Multi-turn Benchmark for Interactive Video World Model Evaluation25 May
  4. 2026SANA-WM: Efficient Minute-Scale World Modeling with Hybrid Linear Diffusion Transformer14 May
  5. 2026WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models23 Apr
  6. 2026Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory10 Apr
  7. 2026Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: Hybrid Memory for Dynamic Video World Models26 Mar
  8. 2026Omni-WorldBench: Towards a Comprehensive Interaction-Centric Evaluation for World Models23 Mar
  9. 2026Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Evaluating State Evolution in Video World Models13 Mar
  10. 2026MIND: Benchmarking Memory Consistency and Action Control in World Models8 Feb
  11. 2026Advancing Open-source World Models28 Jan
  12. 2025WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling16 Dec
7 more
  1. 2025Astra: General Interactive World Model with Autoregressive Denoising9 Dec
  2. 2025Hunyuan-GameCraft-2: Instruction-following Interactive Game World Model28 Nov
  3. 2025Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model18 Aug
  4. 2025Yume: An Interactive World Generation Model23 Jul
  5. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models26 Mar
  6. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators23 Oct
  7. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision26 Feb

Other references · 16

  1. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,829
  2. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,755
  3. 2025VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 1,475
  4. 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,385
  5. 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 833
  6. 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 618
  7. 2024Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllabilitycited by 337
  8. 2023DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 258
  9. 2024T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generationcited by 177
  10. 2025WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generationcited by 143
  11. 2024IRASim: A Fine-Grained World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 93
  12. 2025Hunyuan-GameCraft: High-dynamic Interactive Game Video Generation with Hybrid History Conditioncited by 92
4 more
  1. 2025Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Modelcited by 77
  2. 2025Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 67
  3. 2024DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPTcited by 66
  4. 2025RoboScape: Physics-informed Embodied World Modelcited by 38

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Towards Interactive Video World Modeling: Frontiers, Challenges, Benchmarks, and Future Trends
  2. 2025World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop World
  3. 2026MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models
  4. 2026iWorld-Bench: A Benchmark for Interactive World Models with a Unified Action Generation Framework
  5. 2025WorldLens: Full-Spectrum Evaluations of Driving World Models in Real World
  6. 2026WorldExam: Benchmarking World Models from Apparent Appearance to Inherent Reactivity
  7. 2025Toward Stable World Models: Measuring and Addressing World Instability in Generative Environments
  8. 2026MASS: Multiplayer World Models with Authoritative Shared State