StateCraft: Augmenting Video World Models with Abstract-State Reasoning

Lorenzo Venturoli, Nedko Savov, Xi Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Luc Van Gool

Video world models aim to simulate complex environments with realistic appearance and dynamics. Maintaining consistency over long interactions requires tracking past actions and understanding how those actions affect the environment. Video world models can only generate partial observations of the entire world at a time. Remembering past observations alone may not be sufficient in every scenario, as they may no longer reflect the world after a sequence of actions. We introduce a paradigm that decouples a persistent, updatable abstract state from the visual state. The abstract state keeps track of the entities' changes as the world evolves, and is used to condition the visual state, which represents the current view. We propose StateCraft, a novel architecture that pairs a language model with a video diffusion model to evolve the dynamic world. We evaluate our approach on generative interfaces, which pose a substantial challenge because a single action may change parts of the state that are not currently visible. To support training and evaluation, we develop a data collection pipeline that produces informative, densely annotated trajectories at scale without human or agent…