Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2609.39147

MindWorldBench: Evaluating Mental-State-to-Behavior Reasoning in Image-to-Video Generation

Abstract

Current image-to-video models achieve visual realism and physical plausibility, but reasoning about mental states remains unexplored. Actions are driven by belief, desire, and perception, requiring inference beyond explicit instructions. We introduce MindWorldBench to evaluate mental-state-conditioned video generation. We formalize this as mental-state-to-behavior reasoning, where models generate actions from a world state and latent variables without explicit action prompts. MindWorldBench utilizes Zero-Action Prompting and a counterfactual design with 744 prompts to isolate the causal effects of mental states. An automated pipeline evaluates video quality, commonsense plausibility, and mental-state consistency. Evaluations of 11 models show that despite visual fidelity and physical reasoning, models fail to align behaviors with latent mental states. We identify a failure mode, termed Omniscient Bias, where models default to the objective world state rather than human's subjective belief. These results demonstrate a disconnect between visual generation and cognitive reasoning, suggesting a need for explicit mental-state modeling in video generation systems. Project website: https://richard2049-lee.github.io/MindWorldBench/

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ruiqi Li, Xuanyi Liu, Sijia Li, Haofeng Wang, Yuxin Liu, Feng Xie, Songchao Tan, Shiqi Wang, Hanwei Zhu, Yizong Wang, Chuanmin Jia, Siwei Ma. 2026-09-30. MindWorldBench: Evaluating Mental-State-to-Behavior Reasoning in Image-to-Video Generation. https://doi.org/10.1145/3767308.3838657

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Graph-Aggregated Prototype Learning for Remote Sensing Semantic Change Detection

Semantic change detection (SCD) extends the binary change detection task to provide not only the change locations but also the detailed "from-to" categories in multi-temporal remote sensing data. Such detailed semantic insights into changes offer considerable advantages for a wide array of applications. However, since SCD involves the simultaneous optimization of multiple tasks, the model is prone to negative transfer due to task-specific learning difficulties and conflicting gradient flows. To address this issue, we propose Graph-Aggregated Prototype Learning for Remote Sensing Semantic Change Detection(GAPL-SCD). In this framework, a multi-task joint optimization method is designed to optimize the primary task of semantic segmentation and change detection, along with the auxiliary task of graph aggregation prototype learning. Adaptive weight allocation and gradient rotation methods are used to alleviate the conflict between training tasks and improve multi-task learning capabilities. Specifically, the graph aggregation prototype learning module constructs an interaction graph using high-level features. Prototypes serve as class proxies, enabling category-level domain alignment across time points and reducing interference from irrelevant changes. Additionally, the proposed self-query multi-level feature interaction and bi-temporal feature fusion modules further enhance multi-scale feature representation, improving performance in complex scenes. Experimental results on the SECOND and Landsat-SCD datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in accuracy and robustness for SCD task.

cs.CV↗

Compact Attention: Exploiting Structured Spatio-Temporal Sparsity for Fast Video Generation

The quadratic computational complexity of self-attention mechanisms imposes a critical constraint on transformer-based video generation, particularly for synthesizing ultra-long and high-definition sequences. While most sparse attention techniques employ fixed or heuristic patterns, they often struggle to accommodate the heterogeneous and layer-specific redundancies inherent in video diffusion transformers (VDiTs). We find that different attention heads consistently concentrate most of their attention mass in different coarse query-key regions, a behavior we call functional specialization. Although individual attention values vary with the generated content, these regions remain similar across prompts and random seeds. Leveraging these insights, we introduce Compact Attention, a hardware-aware sparse attention framework for efficient long-video synthesis. We quantify this stability and use it to construct searchable, reusable, head-specific masks. Based on the observation, we propose a deformable dual-window sparse pattern mechanism that flexibly approximates local and axial attention regions within one tile-aligned mask family. To avoid manually choosing a mask for each head, we develop a recall-driven offline auto-search algorithm that identifies high-quality sparse masks while leveraging temporal stability for mask reuse. Extensive evaluations on Wan2.1 (14B) and Hunyuan-Video demonstrate that Compact Attention achieves 2.25x/3.03x attention speedups over FlashAttention-2 and 1.20x/1.74x over FlashAttention-3, respectively, while maintaining visual quality and temporal consistency comparable to full-attention baselines. Project Page: https://yo-ava.github.io/Compact-Attention.github.io/

cs.CV↗

Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation via Probabilistic Gaussian Alignment

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the zero-shot robustness under distribution shifts by leveraging unlabeled test data during inference. Despite notable advances, several challenges still limit its broader applicability. First, most methods rely on backpropagation or iterative optimization, which limits scalability and hinders real-time deployment. Second, they lack explicit modeling of class-conditional feature distributions. This modeling is crucial for producing reliable decision boundaries and calibrated predictions, but it remains underexplored due to the lack of both source data and supervision at test time. In this paper, we propose ADAPT, an Advanced Distribution-Aware and backPropagation-free Test-time adaptation method. We reframe TTA as a Gaussian probabilistic inference task by modeling class-conditional likelihoods using gradually updated class means and a shared covariance matrix. This enables closed-form, training-free inference. To correct potential likelihood bias, we introduce lightweight regularization guided by CLIP priors and a historical knowledge bank. ADAPT requires no source data, no gradient updates, and no full access to target data, supporting both online and transductive settings. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts with superior scalability and robustness.

cs.CV↗