FutureWorld: A Plug-and-Play Causal Next-State Predictor for Interactive Video World Exploration

Interactive video world models aim to follow user actions while maintaining scene consistency over extended interactions. History-based methods reuse generated latents to preserve scene content, but three limitations of this reuse contribute to error recirculation. 1) The latent generated at each interaction is retained as history, potentially containing blurred details, geometric distortions, or semantic drift. 2) Although retrieved historical content matches the current scene, it can still contain errors that are carried into the next chunk. 3) New outputs then become history for later interactions, potentially reinforcing the same errors through repeated reuse. To limit this cycle, we aim to predict the future scene state from the current generated latent and the next action before generating the next interaction's video chunk. This future-state prior provides guidance for the next chunk, with the aim of reducing the errors carried forward from history. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play Causal Next-Chunk Predictor (C-NCP) with cross-model adaptability and prediction-guided modulation. We integrate C-NCP into four base generators and evaluate the augmented models across three benchmarks for interactive long-video generation and action-conditioned world modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate reduced error accumulation and improved long-horizon consistency across diverse generation settings. The project page is at https://GuangYuanKK.github.io/futureworld.