# HelixWorld: A Real-time Interactive Audio-Visual World Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38123/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 26 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 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, 26 of 26)

- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22622/) (2025)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02214/) (2026)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08995/) (2026)
- [Hunyuan-GameCraft: High-dynamic Interactive Game Video Generation with Hybrid History Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17201/) (2025)
- [SANA-WM: Efficient Minute-Scale World Modeling with Hybrid Linear Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15178/) (2026)
- [Infinite Worlds with Versatile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07534/) (2026)
- [Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13036/) (2026)
- [WBench: A Comprehensive Multi-turn Benchmark for Interactive Video World Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25874/) (2026)
- [ThinkSound: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for Audio Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21448/) (2025)
- [VGGT-Omega](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15195/) (2026)
- [Diversity-Preserved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Visual Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03139/) (2026)
- [Matrix-Game: Interactive World Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18701/) (2025)
- [PP-OCRv6: From 1.5M to 34.5M Parameters, Surpassing Billion-Scale VLMs on OCR Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13108/) (2026)
- [Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13546/) (2026)
- [EchoWM: Open and Enterable Omnimodal World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23189/) (2026)
- [PrismAudio: Decomposed Chain-of-Thoughts and Multi-dimensional Rewards for Video-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18833/) (2025)
- [DreamX-Phi 1.0: Action-Conditioned Video World Model for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13489/) (2026)
- [Zing-0.5: Toward Playable Worlds with Real-Time Joint Action and Text Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17909/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World simulation is inherently multisensory, demanding synchronized visual and acoustic dynamics in real time. Yet prevailing interactive world models remain strictly silent, focusing exclusively on visual rendering and control while overlooking the acoustic dimension. We present HelixWorld, a real-time interactive audio-visual world model where visual scenes and camera-grounded spatial stereo sound co-evolve natively under user interaction. We curate a high-fidelity spatial audio-visual dataset with true stereo acoustics and metric camera poses, upon which we pre-train a bidirectional teacher conditioned on 6-DoF camera trajectories and user actions. To enable low-latency causal interaction, we distill the teacher into a few-step streaming student via an online trajectory distillation loss, sustaining drift-free joint audio-visual rollouts at 24 FPS on a single GPU. Furthermore, we formalize spatial-acoustic consistency and introduce HelixBench to evaluate whether synthesized sound fields faithfully track dynamic viewpoint motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HelixWorld matches state-of-the-art silent world models in visual fidelity and responsiveness, while significantly surpassing existing baselines in camera-aligned spatial-acoustic immersion.
