{"ID":22918820,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-17T01:02:08.507062015Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17909","arxiv_id":"2609.17909","title":"Zing-0.5: Toward Playable Worlds with Real-Time Joint Action and Text Control","abstract":"We introduce Zing-0.5, a 5B autoregressive world model designed for playability: users can explore generated worlds, influence unfolding events, and respond to the resulting feedback through joint keyboard and online text control. Our approach brings together three technical contributions: (1) Unified action and text conditioning, combining magnitude-aware keyboard inputs with temporally aligned text instructions and jointly annotated videos to learn navigation and event control within the same sequence; (2) Event-scale supervision for incremental generation, using a segment-level teacher trained on connected multi-prompt videos to supervise a block-level causal student through distribution-matching distillation; and (3) Low-cost real-time interaction, combining four-step generation with context-preserving streaming to support 832 x 480 inference at 24 FPS at an estimated server rental cost of approximately USD 0.009 per stream-minute. Zing-0.5 achieves an overall score of 81.0 and a consistency score of 88.5 across 158 WBench Navigation cases. A joint-control demonstration shows a text-directed event change during continued navigation without restarting generation. We release the model weights, inference code, and Zing-SGLang serving implementation to support further work on playable generated worlds.","short_abstract":"We introduce Zing-0.5, a 5B autoregressive world model designed for playability: users can explore generated worlds, influence unfolding events, and respond to the resulting feedback through joint keyboard and online text control. Our approach brings together three technical contributions: (1) Unified action and text c...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17909","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.17909v1","authors":"[\"Mingyang Chen\",\"Shengdong Chen\",\"Xiaoxiao Fu\",\"Bosheng Gong\",\"Haoyuan Guo\",\"Bowen Li\",\"Jiawen Li\",\"Kejun Li\",\"Tianpeng Li\",\"Yin Liu\",\"Haoze Sun\",\"Zeyang Tian\",\"Meng Wang\",\"Xinmiao Wu\",\"Jiangqiao Yan\",\"Zining Zhao\"]","published":"2026-09-15T23:05:39Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}