Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) seeks to synthesize videos consistent with physical principles, yet remains challenging due to underspecified natural language conditioning. Advanced chain-of-thought (CoT) frameworks augment prompts with physical knowledge. However, such prompts describe physical phenomena holistically, overlooking intermediate states and transition dynamics. In this paper, we reformulate PPVG as event-centric generation by representing physical evolution as a chain of causally connected and physically constrained events. Our framework comprises three key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes physical phenomena into causally connected events represented by evolving scene graphs. Formula-derived physical quantities are bound to relevant objects and interactions, characterizing the direction and magnitude of each event transition. (2) Transition-aware Routed Keyframe Conditioning. This module routes each event to a specialized keyframe synthesis operator for appearance variation or object transformation. Consecutive keyframes are injected as residual guidance during denoising, enabling smooth visual transitions between event-boundary states. (3) Physics-injected Contrastive Semantic Guidance. This module constructs physics-informed positive and counterfactual negative prompts for classifier-free guidance, steering generation toward plausible dynamics and away from physics-violating counterparts. Experiments on PhyGenBench, VideoPhy, PhyWorldBench, and Physics-IQ demonstrate that our framework generates videos with superior physical plausibility across diverse domains.
Hiroki Nishizawa, Hubert P. H. Shum, Yoshihiro Fukuhara +2cs.CV
4D dynamics (3D geometry evolving over time) is a fundamental representation of the physical world and plays a crucial role in world modeling (e.g., animation and games). Owing to the scarcity of large-scale, long-horizon 4D mesh data with arbitrary shapes, early text-to-4D methods rely on distillation or test-time optimization from video diffusion priors, making inference prohibitively slow. Recent feed-forward generators greatly reduce inference cost but offer limited spatiotemporal controllability, and short-horizon generation often leads to error accumulation in long-horizon sequences. We propose a novel feed-forward in-betweening framework for arbitrary 4D meshes with keyframe conditioning. Building on universal mesh-animation latents, we introduce a frame-wise mesh VAE that encodes each frame into topology-agnostic latent tokens anchored by a reference mesh for keyframe conditioning. We further introduce a keyframe-conditioned rectified flow model with an MMDiT backbone that synthesizes non-keyframe frames conditioned on sparse keyframes. Experiments show strong performance and improved controllability on both DyMesh16 and DyMesh32 benchmarks.