# WorldGuide: Goal-Directed Video World Model for Procedural Task Execution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12459 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12459/

## 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 29 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 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, 29 of 29)

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- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13211/) (2025)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00062/) (2025)
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- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in 200k](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09642/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18870/) (2025)
- [Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22096/) (2025)
- [Yume: An Interactive World Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17744/) (2025)
- [Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04379/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03208/) (2026)
- [SkyReels-V3 Technique Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17323/) (2026)
- [VideoWorld 2: Learning Transferable Knowledge from Real-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10102/) (2026)
- [EgoForge: Goal-Directed Egocentric World Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20169/) (2026)
- [Bernini: Latent Semantic Planning for Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22344/) (2026)
- [ASTRA: Automated Synthesis of agentic Trajectories and Reinforcement Arenas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21558/) (2026)
- [NovaPlan: Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Manipulation via Closed-Loop Video Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20119/) (2026)
- [SPIRAL: Self-Evolving Action-Conditioned Video Generation via Reflective Planning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08403/) (2026)
- [CollabVR: Collaborative Video Reasoning with Vision-Language and Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08735/) (2026)
- [TempAct: Advancing Temporal Plausibility in Autoregressive Video Generation via Planner-Executor RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28016/) (2026)
- [PhysAgent: Reflective Agentic Physics Control for Physically Plausible Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16355/) (2026)
- [SemComp-Bench: Benchmarking Semantic Task Completion in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17426/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video generators and video-based world models can synthesize plausible visual trajectories, but long-horizon procedural tasks require generation to adapt to what has actually been produced. A model must determine the next action from its generated state, execute that action, and recognize when the task is complete. Open-loop generation cannot adapt to execution outcomes, while existing closed-loop systems often rely on pretrained executors or indirect verification. This leaves a gap between deciding an action and successfully realizing it. We formulate procedural video generation as closed-loop task execution in visual world space and introduce WorldGuide. Given only an initial image and a task goal, WorldGuide predicts an atomic action, generates its corresponding video clip, and uses the generated result to select the next action or terminate. The Planner and Executor are trained on the same step-level procedural demonstrations: the Planner learns to predict the next atomic action or task completion from visual progress, while the Executor is directly trained to realize the predicted actions. Hierarchical visual memory maintains state across long-horizon execution with bounded history token cost. Due to the lack of step-level action-video supervision for joint planner-executor training, we introduce WorldGuide Bench: approximately 59K step-annotated videos across 245 tasks and 27 procedural categories. WorldGuide achieves a 33.33% Task Success on WorldGuide-Bench, compared with 29.90% for the strong recent video model MiniMax-H3, even though MiniMax-H3 receives reference action plans, and achieves 47.69% on VideoCraft-Bench compared with 32.73% for MiniMax-H3 under goal-only conditioning. These results demonstrate the importance of coupling planning with learned execution for goal-directed procedural video generation.