Papers for

game environment designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Visual imagination methods beyond RGB improve spatial reasoning accuracy

Representing the Unseen: Rethinking Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoning

Abstract: Visual world models increasingly support spatial reasoning by generating RGB views of unobserved states. However, RGB has become the default interface largely because it is well suited for visual generation, rather than necessarily being the most effective representation for downstream reasoning. Different spatial questions may benefit from different representations of the same imagined state: top-down geometry can facilitate global distance comparisons, while panoramic views provide broader context for reasoning about open space. To isolate the role of representation in spatial imagination, we introduce ImagiRep, a simulator-grounded benchmark of 922 questions spanning seven question types across two settings, Viewpoint Imagination and Cross-view Integration, providing oracle RGB and six alternative representations (e.g., depth, panoramic views, and top-down geometry) of the same unobserved state. This controlled comparison reveals that even accurate imagined RGB does not guarantee accurate spatial reasoning, and different questions benefit from different representations. Similar trends hold for representations derived from world-model-estimated states. Notably, estimated RGB alone can mislead spatial reasoning, while alternative representations retain complementary benefits. Building on these findings, we introduce GEARS, a lightweight test-time strategy for adaptive representation selection, outperforming existing spatial imagination methods and showing that reasoning about unseen states requires more than generating RGB views.

Tue 27 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Current methods that imagine what unseen places look like mostly create color pictures, but these aren’t always the best for solving spatial questions. The authors show that different tasks need different kinds of imagined pictures, like maps or panoramic views, to do better. They made a new test set called ImagiRep to compare these visual types directly, and found that sometimes color images can actually mislead. Finally, they created a method called GEARS that picks the best kind of image for each question, improving how machines reason about places they haven’t seen.
Open → 2610.37437v1

Image editing method finds better ways to change pictures realistically

Grounded Exploration for Open-Ended Image Editing

Abstract: Open-ended image-editing requests, such as ``decorate this room,'' admit multiple valid realizations. Direct sampling may produce ungrounded variation, whereas explicit diversity prompting often produces superficial differences. We study how to ground these requests without prematurely eliminating their legitimate ambiguity. We introduce a two-stage framework that first identifies diverse, feasible edit scopes and then realizes them as executable edit instructions. Across 300 open-ended image-editing tasks, our approach achieves 24.6% higher mean semantic dispersion and 17.1% higher mean groundedness than direct diversity prompting, while producing more valid and distinct realizations. These results show that structuring feasible edit directions before realization supports more useful grounded exploration.

Sat 24 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Sometimes when people ask a computer to change a picture in an open-ended way, many changes can be done and just letting the computer pick randomly can create weird or unrealistic edits. The authors propose a two-step approach where the computer first figures out different meaningful areas or ideas to change and then makes specific instructions to edit the picture accordingly. This method creates more varied and meaningful changes that still make sense, compared to just asking for diverse changes directly. Their tests show this makes edited images more interesting and grounded in real possibilities.
Open → 2610.33810v1

LiteReality-Agent reconstructs detailed 3D indoor scenes from RGB-D scans

LiteReality-Agent: An Agentic System for Interactable 3D Indoor Scene Reconstruction

Abstract: We present LiteReality-Agent, an agentic system for reconstructing real indoor environments as realistic, articulated, and simulation-ready 3D scenes from RGB-D scans. At its core, LiteReality-Agent formulates 3D reconstruction as a coding problem, in which a coding agent gathers evidence using specialised tools and iteratively edits a Python script, Room.py, which can be executed to produce a 3D digital twin of the room. With this formulation, we develop a robust observe-edit-verify harness that supports evidence gathering, measurement, verification, layout optimisation, simulation readiness, and quality control throughout the reconstruction process. LiteReality-Agent produces high-quality reconstructions suitable for simulation and downstream embodied AI tasks. Furthermore, as agent capabilities continue to improve rapidly, the system introduced by LiteReality-Agent remains a strong orchestration framework for future agents: it equips them with specialised tools, structured workflows, and robust verification mechanisms that substantially improve reconstruction quality and reliability. We demonstrate that LiteReality-Agent produces reconstructions that are more geometrically accurate, visually realistic, and simulation-compatible than those generated by recent frontier models, such as Astra and Fable. We therefore view LiteReality-Agent as a practical and important building block for robust real-to-sim systems. Both the source code and the data-capture application are publicly available. Code:https://github.com/LiteReality/LiteReality-Agent/

Thu 1 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphicsRobotics
The gist
Building detailed 3D models of indoor spaces is hard because it requires combining lots of information precisely. The authors present LiteReality-Agent, a system that acts like a smart helper using special tools to gather evidence and improve its 3D model step-by-step. It writes and revises a Python script that can recreate the room accurately, making the model ready for simulations or AI experiments. The system also has checks to make sure the model is correct and realistic, performing better than earlier approaches.
Open → 2610.01863v1

CoDimRecon reconstructs editable 3D scenes with deformable and rigid objects

CoDimRecon: Agentic Reconstruction of Sim-Ready 3D Scenes with Deformable Curves, Surfaces, and Volumes

Abstract: Reconstructing simulation-ready 3D scenes from real-world observations enables robotics, gaming, and immersive applications, yet existing methods largely assume rigid objects. This leaves an important gap for deformables, whose simulation-ready geometry depends on dimensionality (curves, surfaces, or volumes) and whose behavior may require models beyond elasticity. We present CoDimRecon, an agentic framework that reconstructs editable scenes containing rigid, articulated, and deformable objects from multi-view RGB observations. Scene-level geometric priors ground scale and layout, while object-level generated meshes guide the agent toward detailed, compact geometry; articulated rigid objects are decomposed into movable parts with explicit joints. For deformables, category-wise agent sessions reconstruct curves as centerlines with radii, surfaces as manifold shells with thickness, and volumes as watertight solids for volumetric meshing. Reusable simulator skills initialize compatible physical models and parameters, while agent-guided behavioral tests expose mismatches and trigger targeted revisions of motion, geometry, numerics, or material modeling. On evaluated Replica and ScanNet++ scenes, CoDimRecon achieves competitive compositional reconstruction accuracy while additionally producing deformable assets for rod, shell, and solid simulation. We further demonstrate robot interactions across all three representations, including a controlled paper-folding case in which behavioral testing motivates plastic bending.

Mon 28 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphicsRobotics
The gist
Building realistic 3D scenes from photos usually works best with solid, unchanging objects. The authors created CoDimRecon, a method that can rebuild scenes including flexible things like ropes, shells, and soft solids by representing them as curves, surfaces, or volumes. Their system also figures out how parts are connected and can test if the models behave like real objects, fixing issues along the way. This helps to create 3D models that can be directly used in simulations for robots and virtual environments.
Open → 2609.36024v1

WorldGuide improves vision language action policies by learning failure boundary

WorldGuide: Learning Success-Failure Boundaries in Latent World Models for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Abstract: Latent world models offer a promising way to improve Vision-Language-Action policies by capturing the consequences of actions. However, models trained primarily on expert demonstrations have limited exposure to failure outcomes and may struggle to distinguish visually similar successful and failed interactions. We propose \textbf{WorldGuide}, a framework that learns these distinctions in latent space and uses them to guide policy training. WorldGuide combines predictive pretraining on successful and failed trajectories with contrastive learning on matched success--failure pairs. The learned predictor then provides a differentiable reward to guide joint optimization of the policy and visual encoder. The predictor is discarded after training, so deployment requires no additional world-model inference. Extensive experiments show that WorldGuide substantially improves VLA reliability and achieves state of the art performance on LIBERO 100 and SimplerEnv, reaching \textbf{96.8\%} and \textbf{72.0\%}, respectively. Code will be publicly available.

Mon 28 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Vision-language-action systems help robots or AI understand and act based on what they see and hear. Traditional training mostly teaches these systems what success looks like, so they struggle to tell when an action fails, especially when failures look similar to successes. The authors propose WorldGuide, which trains a model to recognize the difference between success and failure in a hidden representation space. This helps guide the AI to learn better policies without needing extra model computations after training.
Open → 2609.34206v1