Title: PanoWorld-X: Generating Explorable Panoramic Worlds via Sphere-Aware Video Diffusion
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: immersive content

Abstract: Generating a complete and explorable 360-degree visual world enables a wide range of downstream applications. While prior works have advanced the field, they remain constrained by either narrow field-of-view limitations, which hinder the synthesis of continuous and holistic scenes, or insufficient controllability that restricts free exploration by users or autonomous agents. To address this, we propose PanoWorld-X, a novel framework for high-fidelity and controllable panoramic video generation with diverse camera trajectories. 
 First, we propose a novel pipeline for synthesizing panoramic video-trajectory dataset pairs in virtual 3D environments via Unreal Engine. This pipeline consists of four main steps and enables the collection of a large-scale dataset with rich scene diversity and accurate trajectory annotations.
 To achieve precise panoramic video generation, we identify that the bottleneck arises from the misalignment between the spherical geometry of panoramic data and the inductive priors of conventional video diffusion models. To address this, we leverage the spherical connectivity characteristics of panorama data, and propose a Sphere-Aware Diffusion Transformer that reprojects equirectangular features onto the spherical surface, thereby capturing geometric adjacency in the latent space. This design significantly improves both visual fidelity and spatiotemporal continuity.
   Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PanoWorld-X achieves superior performance in various aspects, including motion range, control precision, and visual quality, underscoring its potential for real-world applications.