Seeing Parts, Reasoning about Worlds: Visual Inference under Partial Observation
On the map: World models → World models for language agents also fits: Video-generation world models and simulators
Abstract (arXiv)
World modeling under partial observation requires reasoning about the complete worlds that remain compatible with limited visual evidence. Occluded objects and unseen regions can leave several world states possible; additional views can exclude alternatives and strengthen the conclusions supported by the observations. We introduce WorldScope to study this process through possible-world semantics, evidence-grounded data, and learned visual representations. WorldScope-1.2M provides 1.2 million English question-answer pairs spanning eight world properties, ten task interfaces, and three observation protocols. Its answers encode confirmed facts, supported bounds, and unresolved possibilities. Complementary supervision comprises 4,800 certified counterworld groups with equivalent base observations and different hidden object configurations and query answers. These groups provide physical witnesses of ambiguity and training-only labels for world compatibility and view-induced exclusions. We propose WorldFlow, which composes cross-view entity evidence and support-surface coverage into an image-subset evidence lattice. Counterworld compatibility and transition objectives train subset representations to reflect how new observations constrain possible worlds. A shared answer generator uses these representations to predict the strongest supported conclusion. WorldScope-Bench evaluates claim judgments and evidence-dependent conclusions as views are selected, combined, removed, or ordered. On its 5,000-question test set, WorldFlow reaches 64.34% exact accuracy, improving over the same backbone trained on QA alone by 24.88 percentage points. It retains 50.43% accuracy on the 3,000 questions from structure-disjoint scenes.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 7 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.
Builds on
7 of 53 references.
References · 7
- 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
- 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,224
- 2018World Modelscited by 1,513
- 2024LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 584
- 2019MONet: Unsupervised Scene Decomposition and Representationcited by 392
- 2019Visual Entailment: A Novel Task for Fine-Grained Image Understandingcited by 252
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026HarnessEval-W: Agentifying the Evaluation of Visual Worlds
- 2026VisualWorldBench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating Visual World Knowledge in MLLMs
- 2026Distill the Visual Evidence, Not Just the Answer: Cross-World On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models
- 2026VIEW2SPACE: Studying Multi-View Visual Reasoning from Sparse Observations
- 2026TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation
- 2026WorldBench: A Challenging and Visually Diverse Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark
- 2026World2VLM: Distilling World Model Imagination into VLMs for Dynamic Spatial Reasoning
- 2025GeoArena: Evaluating Open-World Geographic Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models