LabWorld: Learning Interactive 4D Worlds for Scientific Experimentation

Autonomous scientific agents must not only reason about experiments but also interact with the physical environments in which they are executed. Existing laboratory simulators typically rely on manually constructed assets and predefined procedures, while laboratory videos capture real equipment, layouts, and interactions but leave this information implicit in pixels. We introduce LabWorld, an agent-driven Real2Sim framework for reconstructing interactive 4D laboratory worlds from monocular RGB video. LabWorld recovers reusable 3D assets, a metric scene, time-varying object states, and procedure events. Multi-frame observations provide complementary evidence for asset and scene reconstruction, while motion reconstruction combines visual and geometric observations with event constraints encoding the spatial and temporal requirements of laboratory interactions. We evaluate LabWorld on real pipetting and vortexing videos collected in our laboratory against general-purpose agentic and dedicated reconstruction baselines. For pipetting, LabWorld achieves a mean Mask IoU of 0.501, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.033. For vortexing, it achieves a mean Tube-Length-Normalized PCK-AUC of 0.638, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.035. On five pipetting videos, event-conditioned reconstruction increases the fraction of modeled physical constraints satisfied from 14.3% (5/35) to 100% (35/35). The resulting worlds expose geometry, motion, articulation, and events as explicit, editable state for replay, inspection, and future embodied scientific systems.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.36592
Primary Topic
Advanced Vision and Imaging
Type
preprint
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preprint

LabWorld: Learning Interactive 4D Worlds for Scientific Experimentation

David D. Smerkous, Le Cong, Fu Kelsey, Zhizhou Sha et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Vision and Imaging
preprint

LabWorld: Learning Interactive 4D Worlds for Scientific Experimentation

David D. Smerkous, Le Cong, Fu Kelsey, Zhizhou Sha, Suozhi Huang, Luna Lyu, Jiahan Li, Kaize Wu, Binxu Li, Wenbo Lu, Mengdi Wang, Shilong Liu, Jiacheng Guo, Zhixuan Liang, Siqi Zhu
preprint en

Abstract

Autonomous scientific agents must not only reason about experiments but also interact with the physical environments in which they are executed. Existing laboratory simulators typically rely on manually constructed assets and predefined procedures, while laboratory videos capture real equipment, layouts, and interactions but leave this information implicit in pixels. We introduce LabWorld, an agent-driven Real2Sim framework for reconstructing interactive 4D laboratory worlds from monocular RGB video. LabWorld recovers reusable 3D assets, a metric scene, time-varying object states, and procedure events. Multi-frame observations provide complementary evidence for asset and scene reconstruction, while motion reconstruction combines visual and geometric observations with event constraints encoding the spatial and temporal requirements of laboratory interactions. We evaluate LabWorld on real pipetting and vortexing videos collected in our laboratory against general-purpose agentic and dedicated reconstruction baselines. For pipetting, LabWorld achieves a mean Mask IoU of 0.501, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.033. For vortexing, it achieves a mean Tube-Length-Normalized PCK-AUC of 0.638, exceeding the strongest baseline by 0.035. On five pipetting videos, event-conditioned reconstruction increases the fraction of modeled physical constraints satisfied from 14.3% (5/35) to 100% (35/35). The resulting worlds expose geometry, motion, articulation, and events as explicit, editable state for replay, inspection, and future embodied scientific systems.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Vision and Imaging
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LabWorld: Learning Interactive 4D Worlds for Scientific Experimentation — David D. Smerkous, Le Cong, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS