Orca: The World is in Your Mind
2026-06-29 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduce Orca, a model designed to understand the world by predicting how things change over time using different types of data like videos and language descriptions. Instead of just guessing the next word or image, Orca focuses on predicting the next overall state of the world. It learns in two ways: by watching continuous video for natural changes and by using language to understand important events. After training on lots of video and event data, Orca can help generate text, predict images, and plan actions better than similar models, showing promise for tasks that involve understanding and interacting with the world.
foundation modelmultimodal learningstate-transition modelingvideo understandingevent annotationlanguage supervisionlatent spacenext-state predictionembodied action generationpre-training
Authors
Yihao Wang, Yuheng Ji, Mingyu Cao, Yanqing Shen, Runze Xiao, Huaihai Lyu, Senwei Xie, Euan Liu, Klara Tian, Tianfeng Long, Yichi Zhang, Zhengliang Cai, Ruike Chen, Jifan Zhao, Ruochuan Shi, Zihan Tang, Jing Lyu, Wenxing Tan, Ningbo Zhang, Yangtao Hu, Yuming Gao, Xiansheng Chen, Junkai Zhao, Congsheng Xu, Boan Zhu, Ziqi Wang, Yupu Feng, Qiongqiong Zhang, Yingli Zhao, Yulong Ao, Shaoxuan Xie, You Liu, Guocai Yao, Leiduo Zhang, Xiaodan Liu, Yunyan Zhang, Yance Jiao, Xinyan Yang, Jiaxing Wei, Xu Liu, Tengfei Pan, Shaokai Nie, Chunlei Men, Sen Cui, Xiaojie Jin, Hongyang Li, Jianlan Luo, Yao Mu, Yunchao Wei, Jun Yan, Hang Zhao, Xiaolong Zheng, Jiaming Li, Yonghua Lin, Tiejun Huang, Zhongyuan Wang, Pengwei Wang
Abstract
We introduce Orca, an initial instantiation of a general world foundation model. Orca learns a unified world latent space from multimodal world signals and exposes it through multimodal readout interfaces. Rather than optimizing isolated next-token, next-frame, or next-action prediction, we are centered on Next-State-Prediction modeling, offering a unified state-transition modeling route toward understanding, predicting, and acting upon the world. Orca learns through two complementary paradigms: unconscious learning captures dense natural state transitions from continuous videos, and conscious learning models sparse meaningful state transitions by language-described events and VQA supervision. For pre-training, we construct a large-scale world-learning inventory data, including 125K hours of video data and 160M event annotations. After pre-training, Orca learns a unified world latent space. To examine whether the learned latent supports downstream, we evaluate it by three representative downstream readouts: text generation, image prediction, and embodied action generation. Orca's backbone is frozen, and only the lightweight modality-specific decoders are trainable. Experiments show the scalability of the proposed paradigm and verify that stronger world latent enables stronger downstream readouts. Orca outperforms similar-sized specialized baselines. These results show that Orca, as a general world foundation model, presents a promising approach to understanding, predicting, and acting upon the world. Finally, we discuss the current limitations, aiming to provide useful insights and inspiration for the community.