World Foundation Models: 8 Use Cases with Real Life Examples

World Foundation Models represent a significant step forward in artificial intelligence, offering new tools to simulate and predict real-world environments. These models help bridge the gap between theoretical AI concepts and practical applications.

World Foundation Models enable developers to create realistic virtual simulations that enhance the training and deployment of robots, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Dive in for a detailed guide on world foundation models, how they are built, use cases with real life examples and benefits of leveraging World Foundation Models.

What are World Foundation Models?

World foundation models are advanced AI systems designed to simulate and predict real-world environments and their dynamics. These models are designed to process various types of data inputs, including textual information, visual data such as images and videos, and movement-related data, to create realistic and immersive simulations of physical and virtual scenarios.

The core capability of world foundation models lies in their understanding of fundamental physical principles, such as motion, force, causality, and spatial relationships. This enables them to simulate how objects and entities interact within a given environment, whether it’s the movement of a vehicle, the dynamics of a robotic arm, or the interplay of objects in a virtual world.

A key application of these models is in the development and refinement of physical AI systems, such as robots and autonomous vehicles. By providing a safe and controlled environment for training and testing, these models can reduce the need for real-world experimentation, which can be costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous.

Additionally, world foundation models have the capacity to generate high-quality, realistic video content, which can be used for various purposes, including entertainment, education, and research. Their ability to simulate accurate and detailed environments makes them essential tools for developers, enabling more efficient and precise AI performance enhancements.

What are Physical AI systems?

Physical AI applications refers to artificial intelligence systems equipped with sensors for perceiving the physical world and actuators for interacting with and modifying it. It empowers autonomous machines, such as robots, self-driving cars, and other devices, to perform complex actions in real-world environments.

Often described as “generative physical AI,” it extends generative AI models with an understanding of spatial relationships and the physical rules governing the 3D world.

How does physical AI work?

Generative physical AI combines generative AI with physical-world data for enhanced functionality

During training, AI systems are exposed to simulations that mimic real-world scenarios. These simulations rely on digital twins, which are highly accurate virtual replicas of physical spaces like factories, where autonomous machines and sensors are introduced. The virtual environment generates 3D training data, capturing interactions such as object movement, collisions, and light dynamics.

Reinforcement learning plays a critical role in this process by allowing machines to learn skills through trial and error in these simulated environments. Rewards are given for completing desired actions, enabling the AI to adapt, improve, and eventually master tasks with precision. This process equips machines with sophisticated motor skills necessary for real-world applications.

Why physical AI systems are important?

Previously, autonomous machines struggled to sense and interact effectively with their surroundings. Physical AI overcomes this limitation by enabling robots and other devices to perceive, adapt to, and interact with their environment.

Physical AI systems help improve efficiency, safety, and accessibility across industries by creating machines capable of performing intricate tasks, from surgical procedures to warehouse navigation.

Physical AI relies on advanced physics-based simulations to train machines in safe, controlled settings. These simulations accelerate development, prevent damage during early learning stages, and ensure readiness for real-world deployment.

Physical AI applications

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs): Navigate complex warehouse environments, avoid obstacles, and adapt to real-time sensor feedback.

Manipulators: Perform delicate tasks like adjusting grasp strength and positioning based on object poses.

Humanoid robots: Require fine and gross motor skills to perceive, navigate, and interact across diverse tasks.

Smart spaces: Large-scale indoor environments, such as warehouses and factories, benefit from Physical AI and generative AI in supply chain applications through improved safety, dynamic route planning, and operational efficiency. Advanced computer vision models monitor and optimize activities while prioritizing human safety.

Surgical robots: Execute precision operations, such as stitching and needle threading.

Real-life example:

ORBIT-Surgical, developed by researchers from University of Toronto, UC Berkeley, ETH Zurich, Georgia Tech and NVIDIA, is an open-source simulation framework designed to train surgical robots, easing surgeons’ cognitive load and enhancing team performance.

Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim, it supports laparoscopic-inspired tasks like grasping needles, transferring objects, and precise placements. Using GPU acceleration, it can train robots rapidly, with tasks like shunt insertion completed in under two hours on a single NVIDIA RTX GPU.

The framework also uses NVIDIA Omniverse to generate high-quality synthetic data for training AI perception models, improving tool recognition and reducing reliance on real-world datasets.¹

Why is World Foundation Model important?

Building effective world models for Physical AI often requires vast datasets that are both time-consuming and expensive to collect, especially when capturing the wide range of real-world scenarios needed for comprehensive training.

World Foundation Models (WFMs) can address this challenge by generating synthetic data. This data is rich, varied, scalable, and it enables developers to train AI systems more effectively without the logistical issues of gathering real-world information. Synthetic datasets created by WFMs also help fill gaps in scenarios that might be rare or difficult to replicate in the real world.

Additionally, training and testing Physical AI systems in real-world environments pose significant challenges. These include high costs, potential risks to equipment or surroundings, and the difficulty of maintaining controlled conditions for consistent testing.

World Foundation Models provide a solution by offering highly realistic, virtual 3D environments where AI systems can be safely trained and tested. These environments allow developers to simulate complex physical interactions, test new capabilities, and refine AI behaviors in a controlled, repeatable manner.

Key components of World Foundation Models

The construction of World Foundation Models involves multiple layers of complex processes and technologies including data curation, tokenization, neural Networks and internal representation, and fine-tuning and specialization:

Data curation

Data curation is the first step in the development of world models. It involves the systematic organization, cleaning, and preparation of extensive real-world datasets to ensure the model is trained on high-quality information. Here are the steps in data curation:

• Filtering: Identifies and retains only high-quality data.
• Annotation: Labels key objects, actions, and events using vision-language models.
• Classification: Categorizes data for specific training goals.
• Deduplication: Uses video embeddings to identify and remove redundant data for efficiency.

Video processing

Video processing involves:

• Splitting and transcoding video into smaller segments.
• Applying quality filters to isolate relevant high-resolution data.

Tokenization

Tokenization transforms raw, high-dimensional visual data into smaller, more manageable units called tokens, which simplify machine learning processes. The purpose of tokenization is to reduce pixel redundancies and convert them into compact, semantically meaningful tokens, enabling faster and more efficient model training and inference.

There are two types of tokenization: discrete (encodes visual data as integers) and continuous (encodes visual data as continuous vectors).

Neural networks and internal representation

At the core of world foundation models are neural networks with billions of parameters. These networks analyze data to create and update a hidden state or an internal representation of the environment.

Key capabilities includes:

• Perception: Extracts motion, depth, and other 3D dynamic behaviors from videos and images.
• Prediction: Anticipates hidden objects, motion patterns, and potential events based on learned representations.
• Adaptation: Continuously refines the hidden state through deep learning, ensuring responsiveness to new scenarios and environments.

Model architectures

World foundation models use specialized neural network architectures to simulate and predict physical phenomena effectively:

Diffusion models

• Operate by refining random noise to generate high-quality videos.
• Ideal for tasks like video generation and style transfer.

Autoregressive models

• Generate video frame-by-frame, predicting each subsequent frame based on prior ones.
• Suited for video completion and future-frame prediction.

Fine-Tuning and specialization

World foundation models, initially trained for general tasks, can be fine-tuned for specific applications.

Fine-tuning frameworks integrate libraries, SDKs, and tools to simplify data preparation, model training, performance optimization, and solution deployment, while also enabling adaptation for specialized tasks in robotics, autonomous systems, and other applications.

What are the use cases of World Foundation Models?

By offering tools to generate, curate, and encode video data, World Foundation Models help train machines to sense, perceive, and interact effectively with complex, dynamic environments. Below are the applications of World Foundation Models in various fields:

Autonomous vehicles

World foundation models can enhance the development pipeline of autonomous vehicles (AVs) by:

1. Training with pre-labeled data: They provide pre-labeled and encoded video datasets that allow AV systems to accurately identify and interpret surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, and objects in diverse conditions.

2. Scenario generation: These models can create simulated scenarios such as various traffic patterns, weather conditions, and pedestrian behaviors that fill gaps in real-world training data.

3. Scalability and localization: Developers can use virtual environments to replicate conditions in new geographic locations, allowing AVs to adapt to diverse road regulations, cultural driving behaviors, and infrastructure designs without needing extensive on-road testing.

4. Safety and cost efficiency: By testing in virtual environments, AV systems can iterate and optimize in a risk-free setting, reducing both cost and the potential for accidents during real-world trials.

Robotics

In robotics, World Foundation Models play a critical role in enabling robots to operate effectively in dynamic, real-world settings by:

5. Building spatial intelligence: Robots gain an understanding of their surroundings through simulated training environments, allowing them to navigate and manipulate objects with precision.

6. Enhanced learning efficiency: Simulated environments accelerate training by providing controlled scenarios where robots can experiment and learn from mistakes without physical consequences.

7. Task generalization: By integrating input from various modalities such as visual, auditory, and tactile sensors, World Foundation Models support transfer learning, enabling robots to adapt to new environments and tasks with minimal retraining.

8. Complex task planning: These models enable robots to perform long-horizon planning, such as assembling objects, predicting human actions, or coordinating with other robots in industrial or collaborative settings.

Real-life example:

NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA Cosmos World Foundation Models, an advanced platform designed to accelerate the development of physical AI systems, including autonomous vehicles (AVs) and robots. NVIDIA Cosmos Suite integrates generative world foundation models (WFMs), advanced tokenizers, built-in guardrails, and a high-speed video processing pipeline.

NVIDIA NeMo Curator, coupled with the CUDA-accelerated pipeline, processes 20 million hours of video in just two weeks, therefore cutting costs and time.

The NVIDIA Cosmos Tokenizer achieves superior compression and faster processing for image and video data. Here are the key features of NVIDIA Cosmos Suite:

• Enables the creation of vast amounts of photorealistic, physics-based synthetic data for training and evaluating AI models.
• Generates physics-based videos using diverse inputs like text, images, video, and sensor data.
• Simulates complex industrial and driving environments, including warehouses and varied road conditions.
• Facilitates video search for specific scenarios and model evaluation under simulated conditions.
• Developers can fine-tune WFMs to build custom models suited to specific applications.
• WFMs are accessible under an open license to foster collaboration within the robotics and autonomous vehicles communities.
• Models can be previewed via NVIDIA’s API catalog or downloaded from NVIDIA NGC and Hugging Face platforms.²

Figure 1: Major components of NVIDIA Cosmos Suite: video curator, video tokenizer, pre-trained world foundation model, world foundation model post-training samples, and guardrail.³

Multimodal integration

Integrating WFMs with large language models (LLMs) and other computing resources such as high-performance computing (HPC) enhances Physical AI systems by adding semantic understanding.

This combination supports visual language models and multimodal capabilities, to enable more sophisticated interactions with both image and video data.

Real-life example:

NVIDIA’s Earth-2 is an initiative designed to use AI and high-performance computing (HPC) to simulate the Earth’s climate and weather systems in high resolution. It represents a next-generation approach to weather forecasting and climate modeling.

What is the technology behind it?

NVIDIA is using its Omniverse platform, which is built on top of NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI tools, to create realistic simulations. The idea is to generate highly detailed, accurate simulations of the Earth’s climate by leveraging AI to model complex weather patterns and make more precise forecasts.

What is the impact?

The ultimate goal of Earth-2 is not only to provide better weather forecasts but also to assist in understanding long-term climate trends and aiding in climate change mitigation.

More accurate simulations can lead to better preparedness for extreme weather events, more efficient energy use, and improved disaster response strategies.⁴

To explore how NVIDIA’s AI technology is advancing weather forecasting and climate modeling, watch below video for a detailed look at the Earth-2 platform and its impact on storm predictions:

Benefits of World Foundation Models

By leveraging World Foundation Models, researchers and engineers can accelerate development cycles, reduce costs, and minimize risks while building more robust and adaptable Physical AI systems. This approach can help with the creation of advanced AI applications and ensures safer and more efficient deployment in real-world scenarios.

Improved decision-making and planning

World Foundation Models enhance Physical AI systems by simulating potential future scenarios based on various action sequences. Using integrated cost or reward modules, these models evaluate outcomes to identify optimal strategies.

This foresight enables Physical AI builders to solve complex challenges, ensuring efficiency, adaptability, and safety in dynamic environments.

Realistic and physically accurate simulations

World Foundation Models, including NVIDIA’s diffusion models, generate high-fidelity 3D simulations by understanding how objects move and interact. These simulations are critical for training perception AI and testing autonomous vehicles or robotic systems in diverse environments.

For instance, self-driving cars can be evaluated under various weather and traffic conditions, while robots can be tested for object manipulation and task performance before real-world deployment.

Predictive intelligence

World Foundation Models provide predictive intelligence, allowing Physical AI systems to anticipate scenarios and make informed decisions based on video training and historical data.

Leveraging video-to-world generation and generating physics-aware videos, these models help optimize strategies, improve safety, and enhance adaptability across Physical AI setups.

Enhanced policy development with World Foundation Models

Policy evaluation: World Foundation Models, such as NVIDIA Cosmos models, allow developers of Physical AI systems to test and refine policy models in virtual environments rather than the physical world.

Using digital twins, this method is cost-effective and time-efficient, enabling diverse testing across unseen conditions. Developers can focus physical AI tasks and resources on promising policies by quickly discarding ineffective ones.

Policy initialization: World Foundation Models provide a strong foundation for initializing policy models by modeling real-world physics and dynamics. This approach addresses data scarcity challenges and accelerates Physical AI model development.

Policy training: Paired with reward models, World Foundation Models act as stand-ins for the physical world in reinforcement learning setups. These models provide feedback that helps fine-tune policy models through simulated interactions, improving their capabilities.

Future of World Foundation Model platforms

The applications of world foundation models is expected to extend far beyond autonomous vehicles and robotics. Some of the possible future applications of World Foundation Models include:

Healthcare

These models can enable simulated training for surgical robots and medical devices, ensuring precision and safety during complex procedures, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes.

Education and training

Virtual environments can provide immersive simulations for education and training, specifically for operators of heavy machinery, pilots, and emergency responders, by replicating high-stakes scenarios without real-world risks.

Gaming and entertainment

By creating more interactive and adaptive AI characters, these models can change virtual and augmented reality experiences, which would make them more engaging and lifelike.

Urban planning

City planners can leverage these models to simulate traffic patterns, pedestrian dynamics, and infrastructure changes, optimizing designs before physical implementation.

Security and defense

World models are expected to be essential in training drones and autonomous agents for tasks such as surveillance, search-and-rescue missions, and disaster response, all within safe and controlled virtual scenarios.

External Links

• 1. Needle-Moving AI Research Trains Surgical Robots in Simulation | NVIDIA Blog.
• 2. NVIDIA Launches Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to Accelerate Physical AI Development | NVIDIA Newsroom.
• 3. Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI.
• 4. NVIDIA Earth-2 Features First Gen AI to Power Weather Super-Resolution for Continental US | NVIDIA Blog.