RELIC: Interactive Video World Model with Long-Horizon Memory
Authors: name: Yicong Hong; name: Yiqun Mei; name: Chongjian Ge; name: Yiran Xu; name: Yang Zhou; name: Sai Bi; name: Yannick Hold-Geoffroy; name: Mike Roberts; name: Matthew Fisher; name: Eli Shechtman; name: Kalyan Sunkavalli; name: Feng Liu; name: Zhengqi Li; name: Hao Tan
Published: 2025-12-03 18:29:20

Abstract: A truly interactive world model requires three key ingredients: real-time long-horizon streaming, consistent spatial memory, and precise user control. However, most existing approaches address only one of these aspects in isolation, as achieving all three simultaneously is highly challenging-for example, long-term memory mechanisms often degrade real-time performance. In this work, we present RELIC, a unified framework that tackles these three challenges altogether. Given a single image and a text description, RELIC enables memory-aware, long-duration exploration of arbitrary scenes in real time. Built upon recent autoregressive video-diffusion distillation techniques, our model represents long-horizon memory using highly compressed historical latent tokens encoded with both relative actions and absolute camera poses within the KV cache. This compact, camera-aware memory structure supports implicit 3D-consistent content retrieval and enforces long-term coherence with minimal computational overhead. In parallel, we fine-tune a bidirectional teacher video model to generate sequences beyond its original 5-second training horizon, and transform it into a causal student generator using a new memory-efficient self-forcing paradigm that enables full-context distillation over long-duration teacher as well as long student self-rollouts. Implemented as a 14B-parameter model and trained on a curated Unreal Engine-rendered dataset, RELIC achieves real-time generation at 16 FPS while demonstrating more accurate action following, more stable long-horizon streaming, and more robust spatial-memory retrieval compared with prior work. These capabilities establish RELIC as a strong foundation for the next generation of interactive world modeling.