| title | Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs |
|---|---|
| authors | Zhiqi Li, Yuxuan Liao, Bo Zhu |
| date | 2026-09-10 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2609.11499 |
| upvotes | 12 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf code |
| primer | World models |
| abstract | Code world models represent worlds as executable programs, but this representation alone does not determine how to construct a complex world. We introduce Recursive Code World Models (RCWM), a framework for reconstructing complex 3D worlds in code from a single reference image. RCWM couples a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. An RSP represents the executable world as compositional scene code, while each solver call follows the same complete process: establish the whole, recursively reconstruct unresolved parts, and revisit the whole to refine their composition. This global-local-global recursion gives fine-scale structures their own perception-and-editing loops while preserving scene-wide geometry and relationships. Reference-aligned views propagate a shared camera projection across levels, while parent revisitation addresses boundaries, spatial relations, and shared errors that emerge after local refinement. A vision-language coding agent directly compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement, recursive descent, and return. Across complex scenes, RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods. Ablation studies further support the benefits of recursive construction and suggest that deeper calls can improve finer-scale reconstruction. RCWM provides a recursive construction principle for building complex executable worlds from visual evidence. |
cite
@misc{li2026recursive,
title={Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs},
author={Zhiqi Li and Yuxuan Liao and Bo Zhu},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.11499},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11499}
}