YOCAUSAL: 视频生成距世界模型有多远?一个因果关系的视角
阅读原文· arxiv.org本文提出YOCAUSAL,一个受认知科学“违反期望”范式启发的两层级基准测试,用于评估视频扩散模型(VDMs)的因果理解能力。Level 1通过零成本的时间反转真实视频构建反事实样本,引入“反转惊奇指数”(RSI)量化模型对时间箭头的感知。Level 2引入“因果认知指数”(CCI),利用视觉语言模型将数据集分层,以区分真正的因果推理与时间偏差。对13个先进VDMs的评估表明,感知时间箭头并不等同于理解因果关系,当前模型在因果认知方面与人类水平仍存在显著差距。
As video diffusion models (VDMs) advance toward world models, a key question arises: do they truly understand causality, or merely overfit to statistical temporal patterns? Existing benchmarks mostly rely on synthetic data, limiting real-world generalization due to the sim-to-real gap. We present YoCausal, a two-level benchmark inspired by the Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm from cognitive science. By temporally reversing real-world videos at zero cost as natural counterfactual samples, YoCausal establishes an arbitrarily extensible evaluation protocol. Level 1 introduces the Reverse Surprise Index (RSI), quantifying arrow-of-time perception via denoising loss. Level 2 introduces the Causality Cognition Index (CCI), which leverages a VLM to stratify datasets into causal and non-causal subsets, disentangling genuine causal reasoning from temporal bias. Evaluation of 13 state-of-the-art VDMs reveals that perceiving the arrow of time does not imply understanding causality, and a significant gap persists relative to human-level causal cognition.