English

ProPhy: Progressive Physical Alignment for Dynamic World Simulation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-14 v2

Abstract

Recent advances in video generation have shown remarkable potential for constructing world simulators. However, current models still struggle to produce physically consistent results, particularly when handling large-scale or complex dynamics. This limitation arises primarily because existing approaches respond isotropically to physical prompts and neglect the fine-grained alignment between generated content and localized physical cues. To address these challenges, we propose ProPhy, a Progressive Physical Alignment Framework that enables explicit physics-aware conditioning and anisotropic generation. ProPhy employs a two-stage Mixture-of-Physics-Experts mechanism for discriminative physical prior extraction, where Semantic Experts infer semantic-level physical principles from textual descriptions, and Refinement Experts capture token-level physical dynamics. This mechanism allows the model to learn fine-grained, physics-aware video representations that better reflect underlying physical laws. Furthermore, we introduce a physical alignment strategy that transfers the physical reasoning capabilities of vision-language models into the Refinement Experts, facilitating a more accurate representation of dynamic physical phenomena. Extensive experiments on physics-aware video generation benchmarks demonstrate that ProPhy produces more realistic, dynamic, and physically coherent results than existing state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.05564,
  title  = {ProPhy: Progressive Physical Alignment for Dynamic World Simulation},
  author = {Zijun Wang and Panwen Hu and Jing Wang and Terry Jingchen Zhang and Yuhao Cheng and Long Chen and Yiqiang Yan and Zutao Jiang and Hanhui Li and Xiaodan Liang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.05564},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:11:02.713Z