Vid2World: Crafting Video Diffusion Models to Interactive World Models
Authors: name: Siqiao Huang, name: Jialong Wu, name: Qixing Zhou, name: Shangchen Miao, name: Mingsheng Long

World models, which predict transitions based on history observation and
action sequences, have shown great promise in improving data efficiency for
sequential decision making. However, existing world models often require
extensive domain-specific training and still produce low-fidelity, coarse
predictions, limiting their applicability in complex environments. In contrast,
video diffusion models trained on large, internet-scale datasets have
demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality videos that
capture diverse real-world dynamics. In this work, we present Vid2World, a
general approach for leveraging and transferring pre-trained video diffusion
models into interactive world models. To bridge the gap, Vid2World performs
casualization of a pre-trained video diffusion model by crafting its
architecture and training objective to enable autoregressive generation.
Furthermore, it introduces a causal action guidance mechanism to enhance action
controllability in the resulting interactive world model. Extensive experiments
in robot manipulation and game simulation domains show that our method offers a
scalable and effective approach for repurposing highly capable video diffusion
models to interactive world models.