# AffectWorld: Benchmarking Emotion-Driven Future World Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18305 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18305/

## 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 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 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, 18 of 18)

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- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14803/) (2024)
- [VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03520/) (2024)
- [DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12705/) (2025)
- [Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14499/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18870/) (2025)
- [WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00983/) (2025)
- [WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08971/) (2026)
- [WorldEval: World Model as Real-World Robot Policies Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19017/) (2025)
- [EWMBench: Evaluating Scene, Motion, and Semantic Quality in Embodied World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09694/) (2025)
- [World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18135/) (2025)
- [EEmo-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Large Language Models on Image Evoked Emotion Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16405/) (2025)
- [SVBench: Evaluation of Video Generation Models on Social Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21507/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The world encompasses both physical environments and human actors. Predicting its evolution requires understanding both physical laws and how emotions shape human actions. However, existing world model benchmarks primarily assess physical plausibility and perceptual quality, leaving emotion-driven world evolution largely untested.We introduce AffectWorld, a benchmark that evaluates the chain Emotion-Action-World State through three tasks: World-State Consistency, Emotion-Action Consistency, and Causal Consistency. It comprises 1,498 everyday video samples annotated with plausible emotions, action tendencies, and atomic world-state constraints. A counterfactual subset of 233 samples tests whether changing an agent's emotion under fixed scene and event conditions yields corresponding changes in actions and consequences. We define eight metrics across the three tasks and an additional counterfactual metric, combining automatic visual assessment with human-calibrated VLM/LLM judgments. Evaluations of five SoTA world models (e.g., Cosmos3) required world-state change scores of 0.100-0.280 and counterfactual emotion sensitivity scores of 0.027-0.070 on a [0, 1] scale. These results reveal substantial gaps in generating the consequences of emotion-driven actions and adapting future predictions to emotional interventions. AffectWorld provides a testbed for advancing world models that capture how emotions shape future physical and social states.