Marionette: Predicting World States, Rendering Geometry, Painting Appearance

Game world models that generate video directly often lose track of physical consistency over long sequences --- characters clip through walls or drift apart. Marionette fixes this by separating concerns: a neural model predicts explicit 3D skeletal states, a zero-parameter renderer handles geometry exactly, and video diffusion paints the final appearance. This structure lets developers impose simple rules (like collision limits) directly on the state to fix long-horizon errors, without retraining the visual model. Applications include interactive game engines, character animation systems, and any simulation needing controllable, physically coherent long-horizon generation. Authors: Zian Meng, Zhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Qiang Li, Kaipeng Zhang Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14530v1