English

Goal Force: Teaching Video Models To Accomplish Physics-Conditioned Goals

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-24 v2 Artificial Intelligence Robotics

Abstract

Recent advancements in video generation have enabled the development of ``world models'' capable of simulating potential futures for robotics and planning. However, specifying precise goals for these models remains a challenge; text instructions are often too abstract to capture physical nuances, while target images are frequently infeasible to specify for dynamic tasks. To address this, we introduce Goal Force, a novel framework that allows users to define goals via explicit force vectors and intermediate dynamics, mirroring how humans conceptualize physical tasks. We train a video generation model on a curated dataset of synthetic causal primitives-such as elastic collisions and falling dominos-teaching it to propagate forces through time and space. Despite being trained on simple physics data, our model exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization to complex, real-world scenarios, including tool manipulation and multi-object causal chains. Our results suggest that by grounding video generation in fundamental physical interactions, models can emerge as implicit neural physics simulators, enabling precise, physics-aware planning without reliance on external engines. We release all datasets, code, model weights, and interactive video demos at our project page.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.05848,
  title  = {Goal Force: Teaching Video Models To Accomplish Physics-Conditioned Goals},
  author = {Nate Gillman and Yinghua Zhou and Zitian Tang and Evan Luo and Arjan Chakravarthy and Daksh Aggarwal and Michael Freeman and Charles Herrmann and Chen Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.05848},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Camera ready version (CVPR 2026). Code and interactive demos at https://goal-force.github.io/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:57:50.120Z