Inference-time Physics Alignment of Video Generative Models with Latent World Models
State-of-the-art video generative models produce promising visual content yet often violate basic physics principles, limiting their utility. While some attribute this deficiency to insufficient physics understanding from pre-training, we find that the shortfall in physics plausibility also stems from suboptimal inference strategies. We therefore introduce WMReward and treat improving physics plausibility of video generation as an inference-time alignment problem. In particular, we leverage the strong physics prior of a latent world model (here, VJEPA-2) as a reward to search and steer multiple candidate denoising trajectories, enabling scaling test-time compute for better generation performance. Empirically, our approach substantially improves physics plausibility across image-conditioned, multiframe-conditioned, and text-conditioned generation settings, with validation from human preference study. Notably, in the ICCV 2025 Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge, we achieve a final score of 62.64%, winning first place and outperforming the previous state of the art by 7.42%. Our work demonstrates the viability of using latent world models to improve physics plausibility of video generation, beyond this specific instantiation or parameterization.
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Jianhao Yuan
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Xiaofeng Zhang
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Felix Friedrich
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2026-01-19T09:24:09.084Z
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Felix Friedrich
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Nicolas Beltran-Velez
claimed_verified
2026-01-19T09:24:10.928Z
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Nicolas Beltran-Velez
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user
velezbeltran
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Melissa Hall
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Reyhane Askari-Hemmat
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Xiaochuang Han
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Nicolas Ballas
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Michal Drozdzal
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Adriana Romero-Soriano
Inference-time Physics Alignment of Video Generative Models with Latent World Models
State-of-the-art video generative models produce promising visual content yet often violate basic physics principles, limiting their utility. While some attribute this deficiency to insufficient physics understanding from pre-training, we find that the shortfall in physics plausibility also stems from suboptimal inference strategies. We therefore introduce WMReward and treat improving physics plausibility of video generation as an inference-time alignment problem. In particular, we leverage the strong physics prior of a latent world model (here, VJEPA-2) as a reward to search and steer multiple candidate denoising trajectories, enabling scaling test-time compute for better generation performance. Empirically, our approach substantially improves physics plausibility across image-conditioned, multiframe-conditioned, and text-conditioned generation settings, with validation from human preference study. Notably, in the ICCV 2025 Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge, we achieve a final score of 62.64%, winning first place and outperforming the previous state of the art by 7.42%. Our work demonstrates the viability of using latent world models to improve physics plausibility of video generation, beyond this specific instantiation or parameterization.
Latent world models enhance video generation physics plausibility through inference-time alignment and trajectory steering, achieving superior performance in challenging benchmarks.
video generative models physics plausibility latent world model VJEPA-2 test-time compute denoising trajectories inference-time alignment Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge