Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling

The integration of geometric reconstruction and generative modeling remains a critical challenge in developing AI systems capable of human-like spatial reasoning. This paper proposes Aether, a unified framework that enables geometry-aware reasoning in world models by jointly optimizing three core capabilities: (1) 4D dynamic reconstruction, (2) action-conditioned video prediction, and (3) goal-conditioned visual planning. Through task-interleaved feature learning, Aether achieves synergistic knowledge sharing across reconstruction, prediction, and planning objectives. Building upon video generation models, our framework demonstrates unprecedented synthetic-to-real generalization despite never observing real-world data during training. Furthermore, our approach achieves zero-shot generalization in both action following and reconstruction tasks, thanks to its intrinsic geometric modeling. Remarkably, even without real-world data, its reconstruction performance is comparable with or even better than that of domain-specific models. Additionally, Aether employs camera trajectories as geometry-informed action spaces, enabling effective action-conditioned prediction and visual planning. We hope our work inspires the community to explore new frontiers in physically-reasonable world modeling and its applications.

@article{team2025_2503.18945,
  title={ Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling },
  author={ Aether Team and Haoyi Zhu and Yifan Wang and Jianjun Zhou and Wenzheng Chang and Yang Zhou and Zizun Li and Junyi Chen and Chunhua Shen and Jiangmiao Pang and Tong He },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.18945},
  year={ 2025 }
}