Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling
From Daily Paper Cast by Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
May 2, 2026 · 20 min · Episode 1828
About this episode
This episode discusses the evolution of visual generation models and introduces a new taxonomy for understanding their capabilities and limitations.
🤗 Upvotes: 70 | cs.CV Authors: Keming Wu, Zuhao Yang, Kaichen Zhang, Shizun Wang, Haowei Zhu, Sicong Leng, Zhongyu Yang, Qijie Wang, Sudong Wang, Ziting Wang, Zili Wang, Hui Zhang, Haonan Wang, Hang Zhou, Yifan Pu, Xingxuan Li, Fangneng Zhan, Bo Li, Lidong Bing, Yuxin Song, Ziwei Liu, Wenhu Chen, Jingdong Wang, Xinchao Wang, Xiaojuan Qi, Shijian Lu, Bin Wang Title: Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.28185v1 Abstract: Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
Topics covered
- visual generation
- photorealism
- spatial reasoning
- intelligent visual generation
- taxonomy of generation
- interactive editing
- causal understanding
Keywords
- visual generation
- photorealism
- spatial reasoning
- intelligent generation
- taxonomy
- interactive editing
- causal relations
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