NTH

WorldFlow: Joint Video and 3D Motion Prediction via Large-Scale Pretraining

AuthorsYuhao Lu, Jiongxu Chen, Hexiang Wei, Jiajin Wu, Juelin Li, Mingjian Liang, Fan Yang, Zhuowei Liang, Zihao Liu, Zhennan Wang, Sheng Wang, Lin Shao

AffiliationsRoboScience · National University of Singapore

November 5, 2026 2 min read
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The one-line take

WorldFlow jointly predicts what the world will look like and how objects will move in 3D.

Key results

1.44M
Training corpus

Object-level samples from simulated and real-world data.

1678
WorldFlowBench evaluation samples

Held-out samples across three evaluation sets.

0.060
SpatialCog ADE

Meters; WorldFlow result on the spatial-reasoning set.

54.2%
SpatialCog ADE reduction vs. strongest external baseline

Relative reduction in average displacement error.

55.9%
SpatialCog ADE reduction vs. flow-only model

Improvement from jointly generating video and motion.

68.5%
SpatialCog FDE reduction vs. flow-only model

Improvement in final displacement error.

What the paper found

WorldFlow combines future video generation with explicit, query-conditioned 3D motion forecasting. Given one image, a language instruction, and selected 3D points, its Mixture-of-Transformers backbone jointly denoises video and continuous 3D displacement tokens under a rectified-flow objective, grounding motion in both point geometry and the video grid. Built on NVIDIA’s pretrained Cosmos-Nano framework, it is trained on 1.44M object-level samples spanning simulated and real-world interactions; Gemini 2.5 Pro helped generate captions for parts of the training data. The researchers also introduce WorldFlowBench, with 1678 evaluation samples covering simulation, real-world motion, and spatial reasoning. WorldFlow records the lowest average and final displacement errors among the evaluated learning-based methods on all three evaluation sets. On SpatialCog, its average displacement error is 0.060 m, 54.2% lower than the strongest external baseline. Joint video-and-motion generation also cuts SpatialCog average displacement error by 55.9% and final displacement error by 68.5% compared with a flow-only version. These results support the central claim: generating explicit 3D motion alongside video provides a stronger learning signal than predicting motion alone or recovering it afterward with a tracker.

Original abstract

Predicting future physical states stands as a central challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing video world models leave 3D dynamics implicit, action-based formulations remain tied to specific robot configurations, and 3D motion prediction models use flow-only supervision, providing a limited learning signal for physical dynamics. To circumvent these limitations, we introduce \method{}, a generative world model that jointly predicts future video and query-based 3D trajectories. By parameterizing 3D motion as continuous displacement tokens aligned with the video grid, a unified Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone jointly denoises both modalities under a rectified-flow objective. This formulation couples explicit geometric dynamics with visual evolution, effectively unlocking the physical commonsense embedded within pretrained video models. To empirically scale and validate this unified architecture, we train \method{} on a heterogeneous mixture of 1.44 million object-level samples spanning simulated and real-world domains. We further introduce WorldFlowBench, comprising 1,678 evaluation samples from 11 data sources across simulated and real-world interactions, including spatial reasoning tasks. Across all three evaluation sets, WorldFlow achieves the lowest average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) among the evaluated learning-based methods. Notably, on the challenging SpatialCog set, WorldFlow achieves an ADE of 0.060 m, a 54.2\% reduction compared with the strongest external baseline. It also reduces ADE and FDE by 55.9\% and 68.5\%, respectively, compared with its flow-only variant. Project page: https://worldflow-rbs.github.io/.

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