Can Omni-models Imagine the Future? A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal World Modeling

Junyeob Kim, Jihwan Kim, Minha Jhang, Sungwook Jeon, Hwiyeol Jo, Jeonghoon Kim, Sang-goo Lee, Joosung Lee


Abstract
Recent progress in Omni-models has yielded strong performance on benchmarks focused on static observations. However, their ability to maintain spatiotemporal continuity when predicting coherent future states from previous context remains underexplored. We address this by formulating Next Scene Prediction (NSP) as a diagnostic task for assessing multimodal near-future state prediction, requiring models to anticipate the immediate future from a given context. We introduce OmniNSP, a benchmark evaluating causal and cross-modal coherence across physical, logical, and social dynamics. Unlike prior tasks that often rely on textual or discriminative proxies, OmniNSP asks models to express predicted future states through text-mediated visual and speech synthesis. Our analysis shows that current Omni-models can produce plausible textual forecasts while still failing to preserve future-state consistency in generated outputs. A frozen-generator control substantially narrows cross-model visual-consistency gaps, attributing much of the original system-level difference to model-specific realization stacks rather than textual foresight alone. A modality-input ablation further shows that audio provides complementary predictive cues beyond vision, with the largest gains for logical transitions and contexts with informative speech. These results position OmniNSP as a diagnostic of both near-future prediction and the preservation of predicted state through multimodal realization.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2199
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47099–47115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2199/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junyeob Kim, Jihwan Kim, Minha Jhang, Sungwook Jeon, Hwiyeol Jo, Jeonghoon Kim, Sang-goo Lee, and Joosung Lee. 2026. Can Omni-models Imagine the Future? A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal World Modeling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 47099–47115, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Omni-models Imagine the Future? A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal World Modeling (Kim et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2199.pdf