English

The GEST-Engine: From Event Graphs to Synthetic Video. A Full Technical Report

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-07-14 v1

Abstract

We present the GEST-Engine, a complete system that goes from natural-language text to fully-annotated multi-actor video. At its core is an explicit world model: rather than encoding state as a learned latent, the engine maintains a complete, inspectable representation of the world (which actors exist, where they are, what they are doing, which objects they hold, and how events relate in time and space), expressed as a formal Graph of Events in Space and Time (GEST) and realized deterministically inside the open world of a commercial game engine driven through an open-source multiplayer scripting framework. GESTs are produced either procedurally or by an agentic text-to-GEST system in which an LLM Director plans a story through tool calls validated by a programmatic state backend, so every generated specification is executable by construction. A GEST then enters a four-stage execution pipeline: graph parsing and validation, entity and action grounding, temporal orchestration (Allen-style constraints resolved by Floyd-Warshall transitive closure), and execution and capture. In a single simulation pass the engine emits frame-aligned RGB video, dense per-pixel depth, instance segmentation, per-actor skeletal pose, per-frame pairwise spatial-relation graphs, 2D bounding boxes, event-to-frame temporal mappings, and natural-language descriptions, all at zero marginal annotation cost. We further describe an in-game world editor, runtime capability extraction, a text-generation pipeline, and a production system that renders corpora at scale across parallel virtual machines. Because every frame traces back to a semantic specification, the engine guarantees object permanence, multi-actor coordination, and temporal consistency by construction, making its output valuable as training data, evaluation benchmarks, and diagnostic tools for video understanding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.12231,
  title  = {The GEST-Engine: From Event Graphs to Synthetic Video. A Full Technical Report},
  author = {Nicolae Cudlenco and Mihai Masala and Marius Leordeanu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12231},
  year   = {2026}
}