RoboWorM: Evaluating Movement Realism, Consistency and Acceleration Affects in Embodied Video World Models

Overview & Synopsis

Video world models (VWMs) are rapidly emerging as scalable neural simulators for robotic manipulation. However, most benchmarks only evaluate them as open-world video generators, using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that lack strict 3D spatial and kinematic reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboWorM, a comprehensive, deployment-aware benchmark that leverages known hardware priors such as robot kinematic trees and fixed camera configurations, to systematically examine structural and spatiotemporal fidelity. RoboWorM curates 1,605 episodes across single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid morphologies, spanning both Markovian and long-horizon non-Markovian tasks under single- and multi-view setups. To explicitly measure physical consistency, we propose two deterministic, VLM-free metrics: KIVA for intra-view kinematic stability, and RIGIS for multi-view geometric consistency. By exploiting intrinsic robotic invariants, KIVA improves hallucination detection alignment with human annotations by 25.8% relative to the strongest frontier VLMs, while RIGIS achieves a 130% higher Spearman correlation with human preferences. Furthermore, since real-world deployment requires low inference latency, we utilize RoboWorM to conduct the first large-scale audit of the quality-efficiency trade-off. Evaluating 9 state-of-the-art acceleration techniques across 3 leading world models (over 29,000 generated rollouts), we demonstrate how these acceleration methods can retain superficial visual quality while silently compromising deployment-critical physical constraints. Using our metrics, we achieve 2.3$\times$ maximum inference speed-up with minimal quality loss.