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ShadowDancer: Teaching Video World Models Any Action by Learning Unified Dynamics Representations from a Video and Its Shadow

Research Multimodal & Generative

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Overall 83
Content 90
Popularity 68

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Merged summary

TL;DR - ShadowDancer enables frame-level control of video world models by learning appearance-invariant dynamics from paired videos that replay the same action with different visuals. Demonstrated actions can then transfer to new environments without labels, motion estimators, or fine-tuning.

  • “Shadow pairs” preserve dynamics while independently varying appearance.
  • Cross-shadow prediction isolates a unified action representation by discarding visual differences.
  • The representation controls a block-causal world model across diverse dynamics families.
  • It achieved an average 86% blinded win rate against latent-action and interactive-world-model baselines in rollout comparisons.

Sources (1)

ShadowDancer: Teaching Video World Models Any Action by Learning Unified Dynamics Representations from a Video and Its Shadow

arXiv cs.CV Jin Cao, Zian Meng, Kaipeng Zhang 2026-07-30 arXiv:2607.28362
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 22
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 22 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-30 14:28:53.861217 UTC

TL;DR - ShadowDancer enables frame-level control of video world models by learning appearance-invariant dynamics from paired videos that replay the same action with different visuals. Demonstrated actions can then transfer to new environments without labels, motion estimators, or fine-tuning.

  • “Shadow pairs” preserve dynamics while independently varying appearance.
  • Cross-shadow prediction isolates a unified action representation by discarding visual differences.
  • The representation controls a block-causal world model across diverse dynamics families.
  • It achieved an average 86% blinded win rate against latent-action and interactive-world-model baselines in rollout comparisons.
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