Towards Physically Plausible Video Generation via VLM Planning
Authors: name: Xindi Yang; name: Baolu Li; name: Yiming Zhang; name: Zhenfei Yin; name: Lei Bai; name: Liqian Ma; name: Zhiyong Wang; name: Jianfei Cai; name: Tien-Tsin Wong; name: Huchuan Lu; name: Xu Jia
Published: 2025-03-30 09:03:09

Abstract: Video diffusion models (VDMs) have advanced significantly in recent years,
enabling the generation of highly realistic videos and drawing the attention of
the community in their potential as world simulators. However, despite their
capabilities, VDMs often fail to produce physically plausible videos due to an
inherent lack of understanding of physics, resulting in incorrect dynamics and
event sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-stage
image-to-video generation framework that explicitly incorporates physics. In
the first stage, we employ a Vision Language Model (VLM) as a coarse-grained
motion planner, integrating chain-of-thought and physics-aware reasoning to
predict a rough motion trajectories/changes that approximate real-world
physical dynamics while ensuring the inter-frame consistency. In the second
stage, we use the predicted motion trajectories/changes to guide the video
generation of a VDM. As the predicted motion trajectories/changes are rough,
noise is added during inference to provide freedom to the VDM in generating
motion with more fine details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that
our framework can produce physically plausible motion, and comparative
evaluations highlight the notable superiority of our approach over existing
methods. More video results are available on our Project Page:
https://madaoer.github.io/projects/physically_plausible_video_generation.