# Fluid-Gen-Zero: Grounding Pretrained Video Generators in Physics without Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10984 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10984/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16624/) (2025)
- [VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03520/) (2024)
- [Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05363/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18870/) (2025)
- [MotionClone: Training-Free Motion Cloning for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05338/) (2024)
- [WISA: World Simulator Assistant for Physics-Aware Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08153/) (2025)
- [SG-I2V: Self-Guided Trajectory Control in Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04989/) (2024)
- [PISA Experiments: Exploring Physics Post-Training for Video Diffusion Models by Watching Stuff Drop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09595/) (2025)
- [Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08765/) (2025)
- [ATI: Any Trajectory Instruction for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22944/) (2025)
- [PhysAnimator: Physics-Guided Generative Cartoon Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16550/) (2025)
- [PhyGDPO: Physics-Aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization for Physically Consistent Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24551/) (2025)
- [RealWonder: Real-Time Physical Action-Conditioned Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05449/) (2026)
- [Physical Simulator In-the-Loop Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06408/) (2026)
- [Time-to-Move: Training-Free Motion Controlled Video Generation via Dual-Clock Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08633/) (2025)
- [PerpetualWonder: Long-Horizon Action-Conditioned 4D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04876/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Fluid-Gen-Zero, a training-free framework for physics-aware fluid-object interaction video generation that decouples physical reasoning from appearance synthesis. Our key insight is to delegate motion dynamics to a physics simulator while preserving the appearance modeling capacity of pretrained video generators. We bridge these two domains through a two-level agentic workflow: generation-time planning, where a vision-language model (VLM) agent interprets intent and the simulation rollout to organize generation clips, and latent-space guidance, which injects simulation signals into denoising through region-aware latent wrapping. This plug-and-play design is compatible with current video foundation models. We further introduce a benchmark for fluid-object interaction video generation. Across Tora (CogVideoX-based), VACE and WanMove (Wan-based), Fluid-Gen-Zero consistently improves simulation alignment, reducing object trajectory error by 26.7%-81.5% and fluid fEPE (fluid flow endpoint error) by 67.9%-84.0%, while largely preserving perceptual quality. In a human preference study, raters favor Fluid-Gen-Zero in 55.1%-74.4% of same-backbone comparisons across three backbones, and in 90.4%-94.2% of comparisons against simulation-based methods. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.
