MinD: Unified Visual Imagination and Control via Hierarchical World Models

Video generation models (VGMs) offer a promising pathway for unified world modeling in robotics by integrating simulation, prediction, and manipulation. However, their practical application remains limited due to (1) slowgeneration speed, which limits real-time interaction, and (2) poor consistency between imagined videos and executable actions. To address these challenges, we propose Manipulate in Dream (MinD), a hierarchical diffusion-based world model framework that employs a dual-system design for vision-language manipulation. MinD executes VGM at low frequencies to extract video prediction features, while leveraging a high-frequency diffusion policy for real-time interaction. This architecture enables low-latency, closed-loop control in manipulation with coherent visual guidance. To better coordinate the two systems, we introduce a video-action diffusion matching module (DiffMatcher), with a novel co-training strategy that uses separate schedulers for each diffusion model. Specifically, we introduce a diffusion-forcing mechanism to DiffMatcher that aligns their intermediate representations during training, helping the fast action model better understand video-based predictions. Beyond manipulation, MinD also functions as a world simulator, reliably predicting task success or failure in latent space before execution. Trustworthy analysis further shows that VGMs can preemptively evaluate task feasibility and mitigate risks. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MinD achieves state-of-the-art manipulation (63%+) in RL-Bench, advancing the frontier of unified world modeling in robotics.

SCBench: A Sports Commentary Benchmark for Video LLMs

Recently, significant advances have been made in Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) in both academia and industry. However, methods to evaluate and benchmark the performance of different Video LLMs, especially their fine-grained, temporal visual capabilities, remain very limited. On one hand, current benchmarks use relatively simple videos (e.g., subtitled movie clips) where the model can understand the entire video by processing just a few frames. On the other hand, their datasets lack diversity in task format, comprising only QA or multi-choice QA, which overlooks the models' capacity for generating in-depth and precise texts. Sports videos, which feature intricate visual information, sequential events, and emotionally charged commentary, present a critical challenge for Video LLMs, making sports commentary an ideal benchmarking task. Inspired by these challenges, we propose a novel task: sports video commentary generation, developed $\textbf{SCBench}$ for Video LLMs. To construct such a benchmark, we introduce (1) $\textbf{SCORES}$, a six-dimensional metric specifically designed for our task, upon which we propose a GPT-based evaluation method, and (2) $\textbf{CommentarySet}$, a dataset consisting of 5,775 annotated video clips and ground-truth labels tailored to our metric. Based on SCBench, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on multiple Video LLMs (e.g. VILA, Video-LLaVA, etc.) and chain-of-thought baseline methods. Our results found that InternVL-Chat-2 achieves the best performance with 5.44, surpassing the second-best by 1.04. Our work provides a fresh perspective for future research, aiming to enhance models' overall capabilities in complex visual understanding tasks. Our dataset will be released soon.