Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Baumann, Stefan Andreas, Wiese, Jannik, Martorella, Tommaso, Kalayeh, Mahdi M., Ommer, Björn
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Baumann, Stefan Andreas
Wiese, Jannik
Martorella, Tommaso
Kalayeh, Mahdi M.
Ommer, Björn
author_facet Baumann, Stefan Andreas
Wiese, Jannik
Martorella, Tommaso
Kalayeh, Mahdi M.
Ommer, Björn
contents Accurately anticipating how complex, diverse scenes will evolve requires models that represent uncertainty, simulate along extended interaction chains, and efficiently explore many plausible futures. Yet most existing approaches rely on dense video or latent-space prediction, expending substantial capacity on dense appearance rather than on the underlying sparse trajectories of points in the scene. This makes large-scale exploration of future hypotheses costly and limits performance when long-horizon, multi-modal motion is essential. We address this by formulating the prediction of open-set future scene dynamics as step-wise inference over sparse point trajectories. Our autoregressive diffusion model advances these trajectories through short, locally predictable transitions, explicitly modeling the growth of uncertainty over time. This dynamics-centric representation enables fast rollout of thousands of diverse futures from a single image, optionally guided by initial constraints on motion, while maintaining physical plausibility and long-range coherence. We further introduce OWM, a benchmark for open-set motion prediction based on diverse in-the-wild videos, to evaluate accuracy and variability of predicted trajectory distributions under real-world uncertainty. Our method matches or surpasses dense simulators in predictive accuracy while achieving orders-of-magnitude higher sampling speed, making open-set future prediction both scalable and practical. Project page: http://compvis.github.io/myriad.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time
Baumann, Stefan Andreas
Wiese, Jannik
Martorella, Tommaso
Kalayeh, Mahdi M.
Ommer, Björn
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Accurately anticipating how complex, diverse scenes will evolve requires models that represent uncertainty, simulate along extended interaction chains, and efficiently explore many plausible futures. Yet most existing approaches rely on dense video or latent-space prediction, expending substantial capacity on dense appearance rather than on the underlying sparse trajectories of points in the scene. This makes large-scale exploration of future hypotheses costly and limits performance when long-horizon, multi-modal motion is essential. We address this by formulating the prediction of open-set future scene dynamics as step-wise inference over sparse point trajectories. Our autoregressive diffusion model advances these trajectories through short, locally predictable transitions, explicitly modeling the growth of uncertainty over time. This dynamics-centric representation enables fast rollout of thousands of diverse futures from a single image, optionally guided by initial constraints on motion, while maintaining physical plausibility and long-range coherence. We further introduce OWM, a benchmark for open-set motion prediction based on diverse in-the-wild videos, to evaluate accuracy and variability of predicted trajectory distributions under real-world uncertainty. Our method matches or surpasses dense simulators in predictive accuracy while achieving orders-of-magnitude higher sampling speed, making open-set future prediction both scalable and practical. Project page: http://compvis.github.io/myriad.
title Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09527