Converting video models ➡️ ego-centric world models capable of... humanoids manipulating objects, robots navigating through paintings, and beyond! Huge effort led by Anurag Bagchi over a year! Special thanks to 1X for releasing so much data!show more

🚀 Excited to share our #ICLR2025 work on planning... with neural dynamics models! While our lab has developed diverse neural dynamics models for manipulating rigid, deformable, and granular objects, having the model alone doesn’t solve the problem—planning with it remains a challenge. 💡 Enter BaB-ND, led by Keyi and Jiangwei! We propose a scalable, GPU-accelerated branch-and-bound algorithm, inspired by neural network verification, to enable effective planning for diverse objects modeled with neural dynamics. 🔗 Project page (open-source + detailed docs!): 🎥 Watch the video to see T being pushed around obstacles, and check out Keyi’s thread for more details!show more

(1/n) 🚀 With FastVideo, you can now generate a... 5-second video in 5 seconds on a single H200 GPU! Introducing FastWan series, a family of fast video generation models trained via a new recipe we term as “sparse distillation”, to speed up video denoising time by 70X! 🖥️ Live demo: (Thanks to @gmicloud for the support!) 🔗 Blog: 🔓 We fully open-source our models, code, and data with Apache-2.0 licensesshow more

After 5 months of planning, our first Live2D Jakarta... Chapter event was a huge success! We brought an interactive Live2D showcase to the biggest anime con in Indonesia, featuring over 20 finest models created by our local artists and riggers. This showcase also included a custom-made plugin for VTube Studio that adds touch interactivity to Live2D models, allowing visitors to interact with VTuber models in a more engaging way! We hope this demo could open up new potential for Vtubers in IRL events. Special thanks to Live2D Inc. for trusting me to host this event! The showcase attracted many curious visitors and gave us the opportunity to introduce this tech to a wider audience, and we hope we are opening up new opportunities for everyone. Look forward to our next one! (Model: Key Oriesa by karamomo🍑 | Live2D Rigging | Food Illustration)show more

Automate ETL over Financial Data 📊 Most real-world financials... are not “database-shaped”, and requires a ton of human effort to manipulate/copy an Excel sheet into structured formats for analysis. We recently launched LlamaSheets - a specialized AI agent that automatically structures your Excel spreadsheet into a 2D format for analysis. There are so many use cases for Excel, and accounting is a huge subcategory here. Check it out:show more

Today, we released Lyra 2.0, a framework for generating... persistent, explorable 3D worlds at scale, from NVIDIA Research. Generating large-scale, complex environments is difficult for AI models. Current models often “forget” what spaces look like and lose track of movement over time, causing objects to shift, blur, or appear inconsistent. This prevents them from creating the reliable 3D environments required for downstream simulations. Lyra 2.0 solves these issues by: ✅ Maintaining per-frame 3D geometry to retrieve past frames and establish spatial correspondences ✅ Using self-augmented training to correct its own temporal drifting. Lyra 2.0 turns an image into a 3D world you can walk through, look back, and drop a robot into for real-time rendering, simulation, and immersive applications. ➡️ Learn more: 📄 Read the paper:show more

You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks... for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AIshow more

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for... Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷show more

AI Is Moving Beyond “Generating Videos” — Toward “Generating... Worlds” Over the past two years, AI video models have advanced at an astonishing pace. From Runway and Pika to Sora and Veo, AI-generated videos have become increasingly realistic and more consistent with the physical laws of the real world. Many people believe the next objective is simply to generate videos that are longer, sharper, and more lifelike. But if we take a step back, we can see that the real transformation is not happening in video itself. It is happening in world models. What Is a World Model? In 1943, psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed an idea that would influence artificial intelligence research for decades. He argued that the human brain does not merely react to the outside world. Instead, it maintains an internal model of how the world works. Because we have this internal model, we can predict the outcome of an action before we actually take it. Before crossing a road, we estimate whether a car will pass by. Before catching a ball, we predict its trajectory. These abilities come from continuously simulating the world in our minds, rather than relying entirely on trial and error. This idea later became known by a more formal term: World Model. A world model does not describe a single image or a fixed video clip. It is an internal representation capable of continuously simulating the rules and dynamics of the real world. Why Is AI Research Turning Toward World Models? Because predicting “what comes next” is becoming increasingly central to how AI systems work. Language models predict the next token. Image models predict the next step in the denoising process. Video models predict the next frame. A world model, however, attempts to predict something broader: What should the world look like in the next moment? In 2018, David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed in their paper World Models that an intelligent agent could first learn a model of the world, and then use that internal model to plan its actions. The Dreamer series later demonstrated that many complex tasks could be learned by training agents inside an “imagined world.” At the same time, the development of video models such as Sora and Veo led researchers to another realization: A model capable of continuously generating video has already learned, at least implicitly, many of the rules governing the real world. As a result, these two research directions have gradually begun to converge. But Video Is Not Yet a World This is where the distinction is often misunderstood. For a world model to support meaningful real-time interaction, it must solve several critical problems. Most video models today are essentially answering one question: What should the next frame look like? A true world model needs to answer much more: What happens if I take one step forward? If I walk behind a building and then return, will the building still be there? If I suddenly change the camera angle, will the entire space remain consistent? If I enter a command such as: “Summon a dragon.” Will the world respond immediately? In other words, a world model must do more than generate content. It must understand space. It must understand time. It must understand causality. And it must understand interaction. Moving from watching to participating is where the real difficulty of world models begins. World Models Are Entering the Interactive Era One of the latest attempts in this direction is Alaya World, recently open-sourced by Alaya World, or Alaya Lab. Instead of generating a fixed video clip, it generates a world that users can explore in real time. Users can begin with text, an image, or a video, enter the generated scene, move freely through it, and introduce new prompts at any moment during generation. The world responds immediately. According to the publicly released information, Alaya World provides: Real-time streaming generation at 720p and 24 FPS Stable continuous exploration for more than one minute The ability to switch prompts and trigger skills or events during generation Model weights and inference code released under the Apache 2.0 License Training code and datasets planned for future release What makes these capabilities important is not simply the technical specifications. It is that the generated “world” can now support continuous interaction. The official demo shows that users can genuinely control, transform, and explore the generated environment. AI Is Evolving From a Tool Into an Environment Over the past few years, most discussions around AI have focused on content generation. Generating text. Generating images. Generating videos. But world models raise a fundamentally different question: Can AI generate an environment that people can inhabit, explore, and continuously evolve? If the answer is yes, the impact will extend far beyond video generation. Game development, robotics training, embodied intelligence, digital twins, virtual production, and many other fields could be transformed by the development of world models. World models are still at a very early stage. Yet from Craik’s proposal of an internal mental model more than eighty years ago to the emergence of today’s interactive world-generation systems, a clear evolutionary path is beginning to take shape. Perhaps what AI is ultimately learning has never been limited to images, videos, or language. Perhaps it is learning the world itself. References GitHub: Technical Report:show more

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s... hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.show more

Today we're dropping the "beta" tag from Adaptyv, launching... our new website and announcing our $8M seed round. When we started Adaptyv a few years ago, our core belief was: AI models for biology are only as good as the experimental data they're trained on and the hypotheses they can test in the real world. Now, after a year of working with many great partners, we’ve scaled our infrastructure to the point that we're now open to anyone who wants to use our platform! Overall, this year, over 30 companies started using Adaptyv to validate their protein designs - from some of the biggest pharmas to frontier AI labs to many, many techbio startups. We've run hundreds of experiments, tested well over 10,000 proteins this year and are generating the data that validates the best AI models currently in development.show more

💰$3.5 billion Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV, 2015)... is a climate-tech platform covering policy and research projects. Its contrails team, builds forecasting models and helps define criteria for a ‘warming contrail.’ Contrails org is a science-led nonprofit focused on ➡️policy⬅️, research, open tools, and adoption by airlines and air-traffic systems. It produces models, materials, and publications on ‘aviation-induced cloudiness’ and ‘persistent contrails,’ and ➡️publicizes information⬅️ on formation and altitude adjustments used in current applied work. It partners with the United Kingdom on Operation Blue Skies, contributing forecast assessment, trial design, and data analysis for testing flight-level changes over the North Atlantic. Marc Shapiro, who leads the work, reviewed the National Academies research agenda requested by NASA on the same topic. Contrails org collaborates with Google Research on AI models that use satellite imagery and weather data to predict contrail-forming regions. Separately, Google/Alphabet entities (via Verily’s Debug project) have run and sought EPA permits for large-scale releases of Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes in California and Florida. ~Babooschkashow more

Depth Any Video with Scalable Synthetic Data AI physicists... and chemists continue to make strides in depth estimation from video. Check out this new paper featuring some impressive examples. See the thread for more details (unfortunately no code yet). Abstract: Video depth estimation has long been hindered by the scarcity of consistent and scalable ground truth data, leading to inconsistent and unreliable results. In this paper, we introduce Depth Any Video, a model that tackles the challenge through two key innovations. First, we develop a scalable synthetic data pipeline, capturing real-time video depth data from diverse game environments, yielding 40,000 video clips of 5-second duration, each with precise depth annotations. Second, we leverage the powerful priors of generative video diffusion models to handle real-world videos effectively, integrating advanced techniques such as rotary position encoding and flow matching to further enhance flexibility and efficiency. Unlike previous models, which are limited to fixed-length video sequences, our approach introduces a novel mixed-duration training strategy that handles videos of varying lengths and performs robustly across different frame rates 0 - even on single frames. At inference, we propose a depth interpolation method that enables our model to infer high-resolution video depth across sequences of up to 150 frames. Our model outperforms all previous generative depth models in terms of spatial accuracy and temporal consistency.show more

Video diffusion models have strong implicit representations of 3D... shape, material, and lighting, but controlling them with language is cumbersome, and control is critical for artists and animators. GenLit connects these implicit representations with a continuous 5D control signal describing the direction and intensity of a point light source. This enables single-image near-field relighting of an image using a video diffusion model. We use a ControlNet-like approach and show that, with a small amount of synthetic data, GenLit generalizes to complex real-world images. Given a single image and the 5D lighting signal, GenLit creates a video of a moving light source that is inside the scene. It moves around and behind scene objects, producing effects such as shading, cast shadows, secularities, and interreflections with a realism that is hard to obtain with traditional inverse rendering methods. GenLit shows that it is possible to get continuous control over implicit physical processes within a video model. I think this is just the beginning and promises to make such models much more practical for creators. Shrisha Bharadwaj will present today at SIGGRAPH Asia Room: S423/S424, Level 4 @ 13:50 on 15 of Dec.show more

Deepest thanks to Dustin Yu & Bianca De Vera... for sending us your video message — it was such a special moment to share during the event. You may not have been physically present, but we truly felt your love for all the Cheffies here in the UAE. 💛 To our head admin, Rilag 💫 — thank you so much for helping us get those video messages! Even though you were busy that day, you still made time for us, and we’re so grateful. ☺️ A huge shoutout to our biggest sponsor, Ate quidditchgaL🐰🇵🇭🇦🇪 — you know how much joy and gratitude I feel every time you send those unexpected freebies (Tote bags, Valaya perfumes and more)! You always go above and beyond🫶🏻 And to my Witches OGs GDM — thank you for always supporting my plans, listening to my rants, and walking with me everywhere to find this and that. Your effort and love mean the world! 🥹 Lastly, to everyone who attended and helped make this event a success, thank you from the bottom of my heart! 🌸 -Admin Chocoshow more

2023 was the year of AI avatars 2024 was... the year of AI photos 2025 was the year of AI videos And I think it's becoming clear now that 2026 will be the year of AI world models Fully interactive explorable 3d worlds generated from one or multiple 2d images or a prompt In turn these 2d images can then be generated by AI too So soon you can generate fully explorable virtual 3d worlds based on your own imagination Next will be figuring out how to make those worlds interactive This is World Labs (unaffiliated, but I like it) As always a lot of big AI model companies are now working on the same thing: 3d world models, only World Labs has a real properly working demo (for now) Very exciting time again!show more

30 minutes of video. Robot learns the task. Open-source,... end-to-end. An open-source framework for training robot policies from only 30 minutes of human egocentric videos captured via Meta Aria glasses: Achieving zero-shot transfer to robots without any robot data collection. The method relies on Interaction-Centric Tokens that encode hand-object spatial relationships invariant to embodiment and viewpoint, supplemented by auxiliary objectives like object motion prediction and latent consistency to extract richer supervision signals from the same data. HumanEgo demonstrates strong cross-embodiment, cross-environment performance on bimanual tasks, outperforming baselines like ACT and teleop data while being trainable on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Thanks for sharing, Zhi (Leo) Wang. 📌 Website: Paper: Code: Video: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

Look, Kaimates! Kaisha mentioned us the “Team Kaimates Official”... and we truly felt all the love and appreciation! A huge thank you to our amazing team for all the hard work and dedication that keeps this community thriving. We’re also incredibly grateful to our Team Live, who put so much effort into making this happen—just to show and feel how deeply loved Kaisha truly is. Your passion and dedication mean so much to all of us. And thank you, Kaisha, for always being so accommodating and kind to your fans even when you’re sick and not feeling your best, you still push through to make everyone feel special. That kind of heart and selflessness is truly rare. You deserve the world! DUBAI MEETS KAI #KaiMontinola | kai ☆show more

World modeling and imitation learning have largely been considered... two disparate worlds. In our recent work, Unified World Models, just accepted to #RSS2025, Chuning Zhu provides a dead-simple unifying solution: just train a joint diffusion model over actions and future states, but with *decoupled* diffusion time steps across these modalities. Manipulating these decoupled time steps then allows for marginalization or conditioning on actions or states; a single model can serve as a policy, forward dynamics model, video prediction model, or inverse dynamics model by simply setting diffusion timesteps carefully. The resulting model can leverage video datasets along with robot training data much more effectively, and shows improved robustness, generalization, and flexibility. This is exciting because it is frustratingly simple, scalable, and shows strong improvement on real-world robotics problems. Please refer to Chuning Zhu 's excellent thread for more details! More details/code can be found on our website and in the paper -show more