Perceptual 3D Simulation With Physical World Modeling

Predicting how a scene will evolve after a desired 3D transformation from images is a central goal in vision, graphics, and robotics. Yet unlike ideal simulators with full access to 3D geometry and dynamics, real world systems must rely on perceptual inputs and local actions that are inherently partial and incomplete. In this work, we present P3Sim, a physical world modeling system that simulates future scene states under both partial observations and incomplete 3D transformation signals. P3Sim is composed of three interacting components: a learned physical world model, a geometric conditioning module, and a persistent scene memory. The world model interprets perception as probabilistic inference over multimodal scene variables, providing predictions of the distributions of any scene variable conditioned on any combination of others. The geometric conditioning module provides a partial 3D transform signal for conditioning the world model at inference time. The persistent scene memory integrates predictions over time, enabling online updates and consistency under uncertainty. By combining learned inference with explicit geometric structure, P3Sim balances data-driven flexibility with built-in inductive bias. This design yields a flexible perceptual simulator that generalizes across diverse 3D transformation tasks, such as novel view synthesis, object manipulation, and dynamic scene prediction, advancing toward general purpose 3D scene understanding and transformation.

Physical Object Understanding with a Physically Controllable World Model

A central challenge in visual intelligence is learning the physical structure of scenes from raw videos: how regions form objects and the laws that govern their interactions. Solving these tasks requires world models capable of inferring distributional states of the world from partial observations - capabilities that current architectures do not provide. We introduce a new class of probabilistic world models that support estimation of the probability of any visual variable, such as appearance and dynamics, conditioned on any other variables. Here, we identify that these models can be trained efficiently with autoregressive sequence modeling, yielding world models from which rich object understanding emerges. First, we demonstrate that our model captures the physical laws governing how objects move by generating multiple plausible future states of the world through sequential inference. Then, by analyzing motion correlations across these futures, we extract objects and articulated object subparts. Having discovered these objects, we show that our world model can manipulate them in 3D. Finally, we demonstrate how physical relationships between objects can be computed from the world model, enabling applications such as Visual Jenga.

Unified 3D Scene Understanding Through Physical World Modeling

Understanding 3D scenes requires flexible combinations of visual reasoning tasks, including depth estimation, novel view synthesis, and object manipulation, all of which are essential for perception and interaction. Existing approaches have typically addressed these tasks in isolation, preventing them from sharing a common representation or transferring knowledge across tasks. A conceptually simpler but practically non-trivial alternative is to unify these diverse tasks into a single model, reducing different tasks from separate training objectives to merely different prompts and allowing for joint training across all datasets. In this work, we present a physical world model for unified 3D understanding and interaction (3WM), formulated as a probabilistic graphical model in which nodes represent multimodal scene elements such as RGB, optical flow, and camera pose. Diverse tasks emerge from different inference pathways through the graph: novel view synthesis from RGB and dense flow prompts, object manipulation from RGB and sparse flow prompts, and depth estimation from RGB and camera conditioning, all zero-shot without task-specific training. 3WM outperforms specialized baselines without the need for finetuning by offering precise controllability, strong geometric consistency, and robustness in real-world scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance on NVS and 3D object manipulation. Beyond predefined tasks, the model supports composable inference pathways, such as moving objects aside while navigating a 3D environment, enabling complex geometric reasoning. This demonstrates that a unified model can serve as a practical alternative to fragmented task-specific systems, taking a step towards a general-purpose visual world model.

3D Scene Understanding Through Local Random Access Sequence Modeling

3D scene understanding from single images is a pivotal problem in computer vision with numerous downstream applications in graphics, augmented reality, and robotics. While diffusion-based modeling approaches have shown promise, they often struggle to maintain object and scene consistency, especially in complex real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose an autoregressive generative approach called Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) modeling, which uses local patch quantization and randomly ordered sequence generation. By utilizing optical flow as an intermediate representation for 3D scene editing, our experiments demonstrate that LRAS achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis and 3D object manipulation capabilities. Furthermore, we show that our framework naturally extends to self-supervised depth estimation through a simple modification of the sequence design. By achieving strong performance on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks, LRAS provides a unified and effective framework for building the next generation of 3D vision models.