Mix Forcing: Causal Pre-Training via Mixture Attention for Interactive World Models

arXiv:2610.33589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While interactive video world models require autoregressive generation, directly adapting pretrained bidirectional video diffusion models into autoregressive ones with teacher forcing can disrupt their visual priors and degrade autoregressive generation quality. In this paper, we introduce Mix Forcing, a causal pre-training paradigm for interactive video world models, implemented with the Mixture-of-Bidirectional-and-Autoregressive (MoBA) attention. Mix Forcing jointly trains a video diffusion model with both teacher forcing and bidirectional training, yielding a strong causal initialization for few-step post-training. In self-attention, Mix Forcing leverages teacher forcing to learn causal next-chunk prediction for autoregressive rollout, while using bidirectional attention to preserve pretrained visual priors. To support online text interaction, Mix Forcing further adopts a chunk-wise cross-attention design that conditions each video chunk on a shared environment prompt and its own local prompt, without exposing future instructions to the current chunk. Following causal pre-training on a 14B image-to-video model, we apply consistency and distribution matching distillation to obtain a four-step autoregressive generator. Experiments on our internal benchmark and public benchmarks, including WBench and SANA-WM-Bench, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art visual quality and timely event following with precise camera control. Notably, our model supports high-fidelity long-horizon generation without quality degradation even over one-hour rollouts. Project page is here: https://zelingao98.github.io/mixforcing