Paper · arXiv 2608.27345
PAWBench: How Far Are We from Probabilistically Aligned World Modeling?
Yuandong Pu, Le Zhuo, Sayak Paul, Gabriel Jorge Menezes, Avram Đorđević, Shiyang Li, Yifan Zhou, Bin Fu, Wenlong Zhang, Junjun He, Yu Qiao, Yihao Liu, Jingbo Xing, Xi Chen
The study formalizes probabilistic alignment for world models, introduces PAWBench and PAWEval to evaluate video generators as stochastic samplers, and finds current models fail to match reference behavior distributions.
Abstract
Recent video generation models are increasingly framed as world models. Many physical processes can unfold in more than one valid way. Therefore, a world model should reproduce not only a plausible trajectory, but also the distribution of possible behaviors under the same initial observation and action. We call this distribution-level requirement probabilistic alignment. However, existing evaluations largely assess individual-video plausibility and do not test whether repeated generations recover the correct distribution. This raises a central question: how far are current video generators from probabilistically aligned world modeling? To answer it, we formalize probabilistic alignment as a distributional criterion for world models and introduce PAWBench, a benchmark for evaluating video generators as stochastic samplers of world dynamics. We further introduce PAWEval, an outcome-level protocol that converts repeated video rollouts into empirical distributions over possible physical behaviors. Across 50 scenarios and eleven current systems, no model consistently matches the reference probabilities while recovering the range of valid behaviors. Having established this gap, we test whether language prompts, initial noise sampling, or model training can reshape the model's predictive distribution. We believe our work can serve as a foundation for future efforts to move towards probabilistically aligned world modeling.