A Chosen Future Can Still Be Rewritten: Causal Writability in Video Models

📅 2026-09-14
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了视频模型生成错误物理运动的问题,通过低维度编辑基于简单物理变量恢复正确运动,提出并验证了因果可写性概念。
📝 Abstract
When a video model generates physically incorrect motion, did it fail to learn the correct motion, or did it learn it but fail to use it? We show the latter: the correct motion remains available inside the model and can still be made to control the generated video. We train on videos where red masses oscillate slowly and blue masses oscillate quickly, then test a red mass with fast observed motion. Even when the model generates slow motion in this conflicting case, a low-dimensional edit predicted from simple physical variables restores the correct fast motion. We call this ability causal writability. At fixed strength, we find a sharp depth boundary: the same edit changes the video before the boundary but not after it. This closure marks commitment for that write. The motion signal nevertheless remains, and a stronger downstream write can restore physical motion, while excessive gain overshoots. Early causal writability predicts which errors training later corrects: those errors are writable at more network depths than errors that persist. We reproduce both causal writability and its sharp closure in a pretrained 1.3B video model, supporting generality across model scale and training regime.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

video models
physically incorrect motion
causal writability
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

causal writability
video models
physical motion correction
low-dimensional edit
X
Xingyun Wang
Tsinghua University; MetaCircle
H
Haomin Zheng
Peking University; MetaCircle
M
Man Yuan
Peking University; MetaCircle
L
Leqian Yang
University of Science and Technology of China; MetaCircle
Z
Ziming Liu
Tsinghua University; MetaCircle; Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute