# Game2World Engine: Unlocking In-the-Wild Gameplay Videos for World Model Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 11 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 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, 11 of 11)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Transformers are Sample-Efficient World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00588/) (2022)
- [Improving Video Generation with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13918/) (2025)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [MineWorld: a Real-Time and Open-Source Interactive World Model on Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08388/) (2025)
- [Generative Omnimatte: Learning to Decompose Video into Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16683/) (2024)
- [Kiwi-Edit: Versatile Video Editing via Instruction and Reference Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02175/) (2026)
- [OmniWeaving: Towards Unified Video Generation with Free-form Composition and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24458/) (2026)
- [Matrix-Game: Interactive World Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18701/) (2025)
- [Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18748/) (2026)
- [LoomVideo: Unifying Multimodal Inputs into Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06042/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16679/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video games provide a scalable source of training data for video world models, offering diverse environments, complex interactions, and abundant in-the-wild gameplay videos. However, raw gameplay footage entangles the game world with screen-space interfaces, introducing game-specific biases and irrelevant dynamics that hinder world-model training. To address this problem, we introduce GameUI-Taxonomy and G2WEngine, a full-stack framework that formalizes gameplay UI grounding and removal. G2WEngine automatically extracts reusable UI assets from real gameplay videos and synthesizes temporally coherent UI overlays on clean footage. Using this engine, we construct Game2World, comprising 96K synthetic paired videos with precise reconstruction targets and 1,079 in-the-wild clips from 303 games for realistic evaluation. Its asset library contains 5,132 verified UI elements across 21 taxonomy categories, collected from 1,010 representative gameplay frames. Based on Game2World, we propose GameCleaner, a mask-free gameplay UI removal model that combines multimodal semantic understanding with video editing capabilities. Unlike mask-based methods, GameCleaner directly identifies and removes diverse HUD elements while preserving the underlying scene content and temporal dynamics. In a controlled pilot, world models trained on UI-free gameplay improve overall VideoReward by 6.83% over those trained on UI-overlaid data. On UI-removal evaluation, GameCleaner achieves an average AAR of 95.36 on synthetic videos, outperforming the strongest temporal mask baseline by 57.3%, and obtains the best in-the-wild AAR of 80.05 with 99.8 background preservation. These results demonstrate the scalable potential of transforming Internet gameplay videos into high-quality world-model training data. Code, dataset, and model will be available at https://github.com/Dongping-Chen/Game2World.