Long-horizon video generation & world modeling

History Forcing

Distilling History-Dependent Continuations
for Long-Horizon Video World Models

Hangyi Kuang1,*Chengzhi Wang1,*Yefei He1Weijie Wang1Yuke Zhao1,2Zhuokun Chen3Zisu Huang2Yifan Yang2Xiaoxuan He1,†Feng Chen4,†Bohan Zhuang1

1 Zhejiang University2 Microsoft Research3 Monash University4 Adelaide University

* Equal contribution   † Corresponding author

News · 2026-11-03 Our paper, model checkpoints and datasets are now available.

History Forcing compared with the baseline: consistent snowboarder appearance and mountain scenery over 60 seconds, and consistent object states when the camera returns to a conveyor belt.
History Forcing preserves long-video consistency and models scene evolution beyond the camera’s view.View full-size figure ↗

Remember what came before. Generate what comes next.

Abstract

Few-step autoregressive video diffusion enables efficient generation, yet maintaining consistency over long rollouts remains challenging, especially when subjects or scenes reappear after going out of sight. Despite progress in fidelity and rollout robustness, existing distillation methods do not fully exploit richer historical information to constrain the student's current prediction. To address this gap, we introduce History Forcing, a unified on-policy distillation framework that strengthens historical supervision for few-step autoregressive video generators. The framework uses the residual between teacher predictions with and without informative historical context to decouple this supervision. Such a historical context can be obtained using earlier generated chunks with less accumulated drift or a fixed-view teacher rollout that keeps the scene visible while the student looks away. The residual is then weighted and added to the score or velocity prediction used for distillation, forming a corrected target. By aligning the student with this corrected target through distillation, History Forcing incorporates long-range historical constraints into autoregressive generation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among 1.3B models, with a VBench quality score of 85.07 for 15s video generation and a VBench-Long aggregate score of 79.82 for 60s generation. For out-of-sight world modeling, evaluations further demonstrate more plausible scene evolution and more consistent states when the camera returns, with Evolution Quality improving from 2.35 to 2.70 on PlayWorld and Object Consistency from 58.43 to 62.18 on MemoBench.

01 Long-video generation

One scene. A minute of continuity.

Explore extended rollouts across human motion, everyday activities, and fine-grained interactions.

Select 2× or 4× playback to follow how each scene develops over the full rollout. Expand “View prompt” to see the original text input.

02 Side-by-side comparison

Keep the details that define a scene.

Compare 15-second generations with synchronized playback. Watch how appearance and scene structure change over time.

Baseline
History Forcing Ours
0:00 / 0:16
View generation prompt

03 Out-of-sight world modeling

The world keeps moving.
Even when you look away.

The camera leaves, the scene evolves, and then the camera returns. Historical supervision helps preserve objects and guide plausible state changes.

Baseline
History Forcing Ours
0:00 / 0:16

Out-of-sight comparison

View scene prompt

Camera-controlled comparisons use DreamX-World-5B. Left: baseline. Right: History Forcing with historical supervision (λ = 3).

04 Method

Distill the difference history makes.

A unified training principle connects long-horizon consistency with out-of-sight evolution.

History Forcing: on-policy student rollout, history contrast, and corrected score or velocity targets, using earlier student history or fixed-view teacher history.
An autoregressive teacher predicts the same noisy student chunk with and without additional history. The weighted residual corrects the DMD reference score or the EMA teacher’s velocity target for on-policy self-distillation. View full-size figure ↗
01 / ROLLOUT

Learn on the student’s own history.

Generate on-policy autoregressive rollouts, exposing training to the contexts the student encounters at inference.

02 / CONTRAST

Ask what the past changes.

Hold the noisy chunk, timestep, and recent context fixed. Compare teacher predictions with and without additional informative history.

03 / DISTILL

Guide the next continuation.

Add the weighted history residual to the DMD reference score or the EMA teacher’s velocity target, then distill the corrected target into the student.

One principle, two applications

Preserve quality.
Strengthen historical constraints.

For long videos, earlier student-generated chunks correct the DMD reference score while retaining bidirectional supervision for visual quality. For world models, fixed-camera teacher history guides velocity predictions when the student revisits the scene.

sHF = sref + λ (sAR+ − sAR−)
Distillation targets: DMD, direct autoregressive distillation, and History Forcing transferring a history-induced shift to the reference distribution.
Historical supervision is separated from matching the teacher’s full generative distribution.

05 Results

Longer horizons. Stronger consistency.

Leading quality and aggregate scores among the compared 1.3B video models, with improved camera-controlled revisits.

85.07VBench quality · 15s
79.82VBench-Long aggregate · 60s
2.70/5PlayWorld evolution quality
62.18MemoBench object consistency
MethodStudentDMD teacherAggregate ↑Subject ↑Background ↑
Causal Forcing1.3B14B76.4393.5294.12
SkyReels-V21.3B—74.8084.9989.95
Self-Forcing1.3B14B77.7395.8495.27
CausVid1.3B1.3B76.8586.7589.85
Rolling Forcing1.3B14B79.2294.0994.47
LongLive1.3B14B79.1297.1395.89
History Forcing Ours1.3B1.3B79.8297.3296.19
LongLive-2.0 (larger model)5B5B79.9097.4897.00

Best results highlighted within the 1.3B group. Competing 60s results are taken from LongLive-2.0, as reported in the paper. History Forcing uses student training rollouts of at most 15s.

Citation

History Forcing

If you find this work useful, please cite our paper.

arXiv:2611.02782 ↗
@article{kuang2026historyforcing,
  title={History Forcing: Distilling History-Dependent Continuations for Long-Horizon Video World Models},
  author={Kuang, Hangyi and Wang, Chengzhi and He, Yefei and Wang, Weijie and Zhao, Yuke and Chen, Zhuokun and Huang, Zisu and Yang, Yifan and He, Xiaoxuan and Chen, Feng and Zhuang, Bohan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2611.02782},
  year={2026}
}