[HN Gopher] Diffusion for World Modeling
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Diffusion for World Modeling
        
       Author : francoisfleuret
       Score  : 382 points
       Date   : 2024-10-13 09:18 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (diamond-wm.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (diamond-wm.github.io)
        
       | madaxe_again wrote:
       | I earnestly think this is where all gaming will go in the next
       | five years - it's going to be so compelling that stuff already
       | under development will likely see a shift to using diffusion
       | models. As this is demonstrating, a sufficiently honed model can
       | produce realtime graphics - and some of the demos floating around
       | where people are running GTA San Andreas through non-realtime
       | models hint as to where this will go.
       | 
       | I give it the same five years before there are games entirely
       | indistinguishable from reality, and I don't just mean graphical
       | fidelity - there's no reason that the same or another model
       | couldn't provide limitless physics - bust a hole through that
       | wall, set fire to this refrigerator, whatever.
        
         | advael wrote:
         | I'm not sure that's a warranted assumption based on this
         | result, exciting as it is, we are still seeing replication of
         | an extant testable world model, rather than extrapolation that
         | can produce novel mechanics without them being in the training
         | data. I'm not saying this isn't a stepping stone to that, I
         | just think your prediction's a little optimistic based on the
         | scope of that problem
        
         | casenmgreen wrote:
         | Not a chance.
         | 
         | There are fundamental limitations with what are in the end all
         | essentially neural nets; there is no understanding, only
         | prediction. Prediction alone is not enough to emulate reality,
         | which is why for example genuinely self-driving cars have not,
         | and will not, emerge. A fundamental advance in AI technology
         | will be required for that, something which leads to genuine
         | intelligence, and we are no closer to that than ever we were.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | For simulations like games, it's a trivial matter to feed the
           | neural game engine pixel-perfect metadata.
           | 
           | Instead of rendering the final shaded and textured pixels,
           | the engine would output just the material IDs, motion
           | vectors, and similar "meta" data that would normally be the
           | inputs into a real-time shader.
           | 
           | The AI can use this as inputs to render a photorealistic
           | output. It can be trained using offline-rendered "ground-
           | truth" raytraced scenes. Potentially, video labelled in a
           | similar way could be used to give it a flair of realism.
           | 
           | This is already what NVIDIA DLSS and similar AI upscaling
           | tech uses. The obvious next step is not just to upscale
           | rendered scenes, but to do the rendering itself.
        
           | fancyfredbot wrote:
           | Looking at the examples of 2600 games in the paper I'm not
           | sure you can tell that they are just predictions.
           | 
           | Have you considered how you'd tell the difference between a
           | prediction and understanding in practice?
        
           | francoisfleuret wrote:
           | "there is no understanding, only prediction"
           | 
           | I have no idea what this means.
        
             | tourmalinetaco wrote:
             | The MLM has no idea what it's making, where you are in the
             | map, what you left behind, and what you picked up. It can
             | accurately predict what comes next, but if you pick up an
             | item and do a 360deg turn the item will be back and you can
             | repeat the process.
        
             | GaggiX wrote:
             | When a human does it, it's understanding, when an AI does
             | it, it's prediction, I thinks it's very clear /s
        
               | therouwboat wrote:
               | Does what? In normal game world things tend to stay where
               | they are without player having to do anything.
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | We are talking about neural networks in general, not this
               | one or that one, if you train a bad model or the model is
               | untrained it would not indeed understand much or
               | anything.
        
             | nonrandomstring wrote:
             | > > "there is no understanding, only prediction"
             | 
             | > I have no idea what this means.
             | 
             | You can throw a ball up in the air and predict that it will
             | fall again and bounce. You have no understanding of mass,
             | gravity, acceleration, momentum, impulse, elasticity...
             | 
             | You can press a button that makes an Uber car appear in
             | reality and take you home. You have no understanding of
             | apps, operating systems, radio, internet, roads, wheels,
             | internal combustion engines, driving, GPS, maps...
             | 
             | This confusion of understanding and prediction affects a
             | lot of people who use technology in a "machine-like" way,
             | purely instrumental and utilitarian... "how does this get
             | me what I want immediately?"
             | 
             | You can take any complex reality and deflate it, abstract
             | it, reduce it down to a mere set of predictions that
             | preserve all the utility for a narrow task (in this case
             | visual facsimile) but strip away all depth of meaning. The
             | models, of both the system and the internal working model
             | of the user are flattened. In this sense "AI" is probably
             | the greatest assault on actual knowledge since the book
             | burning under totalitarian regimes of the mid 20th century.
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | What if the model actually understands that the ball will
               | fall and bounce because of mass, gravity, acceleration,
               | momentum, impulse, elasticity? I mean you can just ask
               | ChatGPT and Claude, I guess you would answer that in this
               | case it's just prediction, but if they were human then it
               | would be understanding.
        
               | nonrandomstring wrote:
               | > I guess you would answer that in this case it's just
               | prediction,
               | 
               | No I would answer that it is indeed understanding, to
               | upend your "guess" (prediction) and so prove that while
               | you think you can "predict" the next answer you lack
               | understanding of what the argument is really about :)
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | I think I understand the topic quite well, since you
               | deliberately deviate from answering the question. You
               | made a practical example that doesn't really work in
               | practice.
        
               | binary132 wrote:
               | I think GP is saying that understanding is measured by
               | predictive capability of the theory
               | 
               | and in case you hadn't noticed, that kind of
               | uncomprehending slopthink has been going on for a lot
               | longer than the AI fad
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | That's bs. You have no understanding of understanding.
           | 
           | Hooke's law was pure curve-fitting. Hooke definitely did not
           | understand the "why". And yet we don't consider that bad
           | physics.
           | 
           | Newton's laws can be derived from curve fitting. How is that
           | different from "understanding"?
        
             | madaxe_again wrote:
             | Einstein couldn't even explain _why_ general relativity
             | occurred. Sure, spacetime is curved by mass, but _why_?
             | What a loser.
        
               | killerstorm wrote:
               | It's very illustrative to look into the history of
               | discovery of laws of motion, as it's quite well
               | documented.
               | 
               | People have an intuitive understanding of motion - we see
               | it literally every day, we throw objects, etc.
               | 
               | And yet it took literally thousands of years since
               | discovery of mathematics (geometry, etc.) to formulate a
               | concept of force, momentum, etc.
               | 
               | Ancient Greek mathematicians could do integration, so
               | they were not lacking mathematical sophistication. And
               | yet their understanding of motion was so primitive:
               | 
               | Aristotle, an extremely smart man, was muttering
               | something about "violent" and "natural" motion: https://e
               | n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Anti...
               | 
               | People started to understand the conservation of quantity
               | of motion only in 17th century.
               | 
               | So we have two possibilities:
               | 
               | * everyone until 17th century was dumb af (despite being
               | able to do quite impressive calculations)
               | 
               | * scientific discovery is really a heuristic-driven
               | search process where people try various things until they
               | find a good fit
               | 
               | I.e. millions of people were somehow failing to
               | understand motion for literally thousands of years until
               | they collected enough assertions about motion that they
               | were able to formulate the rule of conservation, test it,
               | and confirm it fits. And only then it became
               | understanding.
               | 
               | You can literally see conservation of momentum on a
               | billiard table: you "violently" hit one ball, it hits
               | other balls and they start to move, but slower, etc. So
               | you really transfer something from one ball to the rest.
               | And yet people could not see it for thousands of years.
               | 
               | What this shows is that there's nothing fundamental about
               | understanding: it's just a sense of familiarity, it is a
               | sense that your model fits well. Under the hood it's all
               | prediction and curve fitting.
               | 
               | We literally have prediction hardware in our brains:
               | cerebellum has specialized cells which can predict, e.g.
               | motion. So people with damaged cerebellum have impaired
               | movement: they still can move, but their movement are not
               | precise. When do you think we find specialized
               | understanding cells in the human brain?
        
               | mrob wrote:
               | It seems to me that your evidence supports the exact
               | opposite of your conclusion. Familiarity was only enough
               | to find ad-hoc heuristics for specific situations. It let
               | us discover intuitive methods to throw stones, drive
               | carts, play ball games, etc. but never discovered the
               | general principle behind them. A skilled archer does not
               | automatically know that the same rules can be used to aim
               | a mortar.
               | 
               | Ad-hoc heuristics are not the same thing as
               | understanding. It took formal reasoning for humans to
               | actually understand motion, of a type that modern AI does
               | not use. There is something fundamental about
               | understanding that no amount of familiarity can
               | substitute for. Modern AI can gain enormous amounts of
               | familiarity but still fail to understand, e.g. this
               | Counter-Strike simulator not knowing what happens when
               | the player walks into a wall.
        
               | killerstorm wrote:
               | People found that `m * v` is the quantity which is
               | conserved.
               | 
               | There's no understanding. It's just a formula which
               | matches the observations. It also matches our intuition
               | (a heavier object is hard to move, etc), and you feel
               | this connection as understanding.
               | 
               | Centuries later people found that conservation laws are
               | linked to symmetries. But again, it's not some
               | fundamental truth, it's just a link between two concepts.
               | 
               | LLM can link two concepts too. So why do you believe that
               | LLM cannot understand?
               | 
               | I middle school I did extremely well in physics classes -
               | I could solve complex problems which my classmates
               | couldn't because I could visualize the physical process
               | (e.g. motion of an object) and link that to formulas.
               | This means I understood it, right?
               | 
               | Years later I thought "But what *is* motion,
               | fundamentally?". I grabbed Landau-Lifshitz mechanics
               | textbook. How do they define motion? Apparently, bodies
               | move in a way to minimize some integral. They can derive
               | the rest from it. But it doesn't explain what a motion
               | is. Some of the best physicists in the world cannot
               | define it.
               | 
               | So I don't think there's anything to understanding except
               | feeling of connection between different things. "X is
               | like Y except for Z".
        
               | mrob wrote:
               | Understanding is finding the simplest general solution.
               | Newton's laws are understanding. Catching the ball is
               | not. LLMs take billions of parameters to do anything and
               | don't even generalize well. That's obviously not
               | understanding.
        
               | killerstorm wrote:
               | You're confusing two meanings of world "understanding":
               | 
               | 1. Finding a comprehensive explanation
               | 
               | 2. Having a comprehensive explanation which is usable
               | 
               | 99.999% people on Earth do not discover any new laws, so
               | I don't think you use #1 as a fundamental deficiency of
               | LLMs.
               | 
               | And nobody is saying that just training a LLM produces
               | understanding of new phenomena. That's a strawman.
               | 
               | The thesis is that a more powerful LLM together with more
               | software, more models, etc, can potentially discover
               | something new. That's not observed yet. But I'd say it
               | would be weird if LLM can match capabilities of average
               | folk but never match Newton. It's not like Newton's brain
               | is fundamentally different.
               | 
               | Also worth noting that formulas can be discovered by
               | enumeration. E.g. `m * v` should not be particularly hard
               | to discover. And the fact that it took people centuries
               | implies that that's what happened: people tried different
               | formulas until they found one which works. It doesn't
               | have to be some fancy Newton magic.
        
               | mrob wrote:
               | I'm certain that people did not spend centuries trying
               | different formulas for the laws of motion before finding
               | one that worked. The crucial insight was applying any
               | formula at all. Once you have that then the rest is
               | relatively easy. I don't see LLMs making that kind of
               | discovery.
        
           | madaxe_again wrote:
           | Yet _we_ have no understanding, only prediction. We can
           | describe a great many things in detail, how they interact -
           | and we can claim to understand things, yet if you recursively
           | ask "why?" everybody, and I mean _everybody_ , will reach a
           | point where they say "I don't know" or "god".
           | 
           | An incomplete understanding is no understanding at all, and I
           | would argue that we can only predict, and we can certainly
           | emulate reality, otherwise we would not be able to function
           | within it. A toddler can emulate reality, anticipate
           | causality - and they certainly can't be said to be in
           | possession of a robust grand unified theory.
        
         | TinkersW wrote:
         | It requires a monster GPU to run 10 fps at what looks like sub
         | 720p... I think it may be abit more than 5 years..
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | It's not _that_ great yet.
         | 
         | Given a model which can generate the game view in ~real time
         | and a model which can generate the models and textures, why
         | would you ever use the first option, apart from a cool tech
         | demo? I'm sure there's space for new dreamy games where
         | invisible space behind you transforms when you turn around, but
         | for other genres... why? Destructible environment has been
         | possible for quite a while, but once you allow that everywhere,
         | you can get games into unplayable state. They need to be
         | designed around that mechanic to work well: Noita, Worms,
         | Teardown, etc. I don't believe the "limitless physics" would
         | matter after a few minutes.
        
         | qayxc wrote:
         | I think you're missing the most important point: these models
         | need to be trained on something and that something is a fully
         | developed, working game.
         | 
         | You're basically saying that game development would need to do
         | the work twice: step 1: develop a fully functional game, step
         | 2: spend ridiculous effort (in terms of time and compute) on
         | training a model to emulate the game in a half-baked fashion.
         | 
         | It's a solution looking for a problem.
        
           | manmal wrote:
           | The world model can still be rendered in very low res, and
           | then the diffusion skin/remaster is applied.
           | 
           | And this would also be an exciting route to go at remastering
           | old games. I'd pay a lot to play NFS Porsche again, with
           | photorealism. Or imagine Command & Conquer Red Alert,
           | ,,rendered" with such a model.
        
             | qayxc wrote:
             | NVIDIA's RTX Remix [1] suite of tools already does that. It
             | doesn't require any model training or dozens of hours of
             | pre-recorded gameplay either.
             | 
             | You can drop in low-res textures and have AI tools upscale
             | them. Models can be replaced, as well as lighting and the
             | best part: it's all under your control. You're not at the
             | merci of obscure training material that might or might not
             | result in a consistent look-and-feel. More knobs, more
             | control, less compute required.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/rtx-remix/
        
               | manmal wrote:
               | TIL, thanks for posting. The workflow I was sketching out
               | is simpler though: Render a legacy game or low fidelity
               | modern game as-is, and run it through a diffusion model
               | in real time.
        
           | FeepingCreature wrote:
           | You can crosstrain on reality.
        
             | qayxc wrote:
             | Sure - and that'll work great on titles like Ratchet &
             | Clank [1] or Tiny Tina's Wonderland [2] because art and
             | style are dead and everything must be a mirror-like
             | reflection of reality in order to be a fun game...
             | 
             | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_%26_Clank
             | 
             | [2]https://playwonderlands.2k.com
        
           | empath75 wrote:
           | No, you use it to simulate things that we don't have
           | efficient perfect models of -- like the actual world.
           | Everyone is correct that using this to simulate counterstrike
           | is pointless. This is not video game technology, this is
           | autonomous agent technology -- training robots to predict and
           | navigate the real world.
        
         | Arch485 wrote:
         | It seems extremely unlikely to me that ML models will ever run
         | entire games. Nobody wants a game that's "entirely
         | indistinguishable from reality" anyways. If they did, they
         | would go outside.
         | 
         | I think it's possible specific engine components could be ML-
         | driven in the future, like graphics or NPC interactions. This
         | is already happening to a certain degree.
         | 
         | Now, I don't think it's impossible for an ML model to run an
         | entire game. I just don't think making + running your game in a
         | predictive ML model will ever be more effective than making a
         | game the normal way.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | Yep, the fuzziness and opaqueness of ML models makes
           | developing an entire game state inside one a non-starter in
           | my opinion. You need precise rules, and you need to be able
           | to iterate on those rules quickly, neither of which are
           | feasible with our current understanding of ML models. Nobody
           | wants a version of CS:GO where fundamental constants like
           | weapon damage run on dream logic.
           | 
           | If ML has any place in games it's for specific subsystems
           | which don't need absolute precision, NPC behaviour, character
           | animation, refining the output of a renderer, that kind of
           | thing.
        
       | mungoman2 wrote:
       | This is getting ridiculous!
       | 
       | Curious, since this is a strong loop old frame + input -> new
       | frame, What happens if a non-CS image is used to start it off? Or
       | a map the model has never seen. Will the model play ball, or will
       | it drift back to known CS maps?
        
         | Arch-TK wrote:
         | Looks like it only knows Dust 2 since every single "dream" (I'm
         | going to call them that since looking at this stuff feels like
         | dreaming about Dust 2) is of that map only.
        
       | advael wrote:
       | Dang this is the first paper I've seen in a while that makes me
       | think I need new GPUs
        
       | 6510 wrote:
       | Can it use a seed that makes the same map every time?
        
       | croo wrote:
       | For anyone who actually tried it :
       | 
       | Does it respects/builds some kind of game map in the process or
       | is it just a bizarre psychedelic dream walk experience where you
       | cannot go back the same place twice and space dimensions are just
       | funny? Is a game map finite?
        
         | delusional wrote:
         | Just tried it out, and no. It doesn't have any sort of "map"
         | awareness. It's very much in the "recall/replay" category of
         | "AI" where it seems to accurately recall stuff that is part of
         | the training dataset, but as soon as you do something not in
         | there (like walk into a wall), it completely freaks out and
         | spits out gibberish. Plausible gibberish, but gibberish none
         | the less.
        
           | neongreen wrote:
           | Can you upload a screen recording? I don't think I can run
           | the model locally but it'd be super interesting to see what
           | happens if you run into a wall
        
           | kqr wrote:
           | This should mainly be a matter of giving it more training
           | though, right? It sounds like to amount of training it's
           | gotten is relatively sparse.
        
             | treyd wrote:
             | It doesn't have any ability to reason about what you did
             | more than a couple of seconds ago. Its memory is what's
             | currently on the screen and what the user's last few inputs
             | were.
        
             | delusional wrote:
             | Theoretically. In practice, that's not clear. As you add
             | more training data you have to ask yourself what the point
             | is. we already have a pretty good simulation of Counter
             | Strike.
        
         | aidos wrote:
         | Just skimmed the article but my guess is that it's a dream type
         | experience where if you turned around 180 and walked the other
         | direction it wouldn't correspond to where you just came from.
         | More like an infinite map.
        
           | lopuhin wrote:
           | I don't think so, what they show on CS video is exactly the
           | Dust2 map, not just something similar/inspired by it.
        
             | twic wrote:
             | It's trained on moving around dust2, so as long as the
             | previous frame was a view of dust2, the next frame is very
             | likely to be a plausible subsequent view of dust2. In some
             | sense, this encodes a map; but it's not what most people
             | think of when they think about maps.
             | 
             | I'd be interested to see what happens if you look down at
             | your feet for a while, then back up. If the ground looks
             | the same everywhere, do you come up in a random place?
        
             | arendtio wrote:
             | It probably depends on what you see. As long as you have a
             | broad view over a part of the map, you should stay in that
             | region, but I guess that if you look at a mono-color wall,
             | you probably find yourself in a very different part of the
             | map when you look around yourself again.
             | 
             | But I am just guessing, and I haven't tried it yet.
        
         | InsideOutSanta wrote:
         | Just looking at the first video, there's a section where
         | structures just suddenly appear in front of the player, so this
         | does not appear to build any kind of map, or have any kind of
         | meaningful awareness of something resembling a game state.
         | 
         | This is similar to LLM-based RPGs I've played, where you can
         | pick up a sword and put it in your empty bag, and then pull out
         | a loaf of bread and eat it.
        
           | anal_reactor wrote:
           | > you can pick up a sword and put it in your empty bag, and
           | then pull out a loaf of bread and eat it
           | 
           | Mondays
        
       | cousin_it wrote:
       | I continue to be puzzled by people who don't notice the "noise of
       | hell" in NN pictures and videos. To me it's always recognizable
       | and terrifying, has been from the start.
        
         | HKH2 wrote:
         | Eyes have a lot of noise too.
        
         | npteljes wrote:
         | What do you mean by noise of hell in particular? I do notice
         | that the images are almost always uncanny in a way, but maybe
         | we're not meaning the same thing. Could you elaborate on what
         | you experience?
        
         | taneq wrote:
         | Like a subtle but unsettling babble/hubbub/cacophony? If so
         | then I think I kind of know what you mean.
        
           | TechDebtDevin wrote:
           | There's definately a bit of an uncanny valley in the land of
           | top tier diffusion models. A generative video of someone
           | smiling is way more likely to illicit this response for me
           | than a generative image or single frame. It definately has
           | something to do with the movement.
        
           | cousin_it wrote:
           | Yes, that's exactly it.
        
       | fancyfredbot wrote:
       | Strangely the paper doesn't seem to give much detail on the cs-go
       | example. Actually the paper explicitly mentions it's limited to
       | discrete control environments. Unless I'm missing something the
       | mouse input for counterstrike isn't discrete and wouldn't work.
       | 
       | I'm not sure why the title says it was trained on 2x4090 either
       | as I can't see this on either the linked page or the paper. The
       | paper mentions a GPU year of 4090 compute was used to train the
       | Atari model.
        
         | c1b wrote:
         | CSGO model is only 1.5 gb & training took 12 days on a 4090
         | 
         | https://github.com/eloialonso/diamond/tree/csgo?tab=readme-o...
        
           | fancyfredbot wrote:
           | Thanks, that's the detail I was looking for on the training.
           | It's amazing results like this can be achieved at such a low
           | costs! I thought this kind of work was out of reach for the
           | GPU poor.
           | 
           | The part about the continuous control still seems weird to me
           | though. If anyone understands that then very interested to
           | hear more.
        
       | TealMyEal wrote:
       | What's the end goal here? personalised games for everyone. ultra-
       | graphics. i dont really see how this is going to be better than
       | our engine based systems.
       | 
       | I love being a horse in the 1900s that automobilewill never take
       | off /s
        
         | qayxc wrote:
         | It's a research paper. Not everything that comes out of
         | research has an immediate real-world application in mind.
         | 
         | Games are just an accessible and easy to replicate context to
         | work in, they're not an end goal or target application.
         | 
         | The research is about AI agents interacting with and creating
         | world models. Such world models could just as well be alien
         | environments - i.e. the kind of stuff an interstellar and even
         | interplanetary probe would need to be able to do, as two-way
         | communication over large distances is impractical.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | The goal is to train agents that can imagine consequences
         | before acting. But it could also become a cheap way to create
         | experiences and user interfaces on the fly, imagine if you can
         | have any app UI dreamed up like that, not just games.
         | Generative visual interfaces could be a big leap over text
         | mode.
        
       | francoisfleuret wrote:
       | This is 300M parameters model (1/1300th of the big llama-3)
       | trained with 5M frames with 12 days of a GTX4090.
       | 
       | This is what a big tech company was doing in 2015.
       | 
       | The same stuff at industrial scale a la large LLMs would be
       | absolutely mind blowing.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | If 12 days with an RTX4090 is all you need, some random people
         | on the Internet will soon start training their own.
        
         | Sardtok wrote:
         | Two 4090s, but yeah.
        
           | Sardtok wrote:
           | Never mind, the repo on Github says 12 days on a 4090, so I'm
           | unsure why the title here says two.
        
         | gjulianm wrote:
         | What exactly would be the benefit of that? We already have
         | Counter Strike working far more smooth than this, without
         | wasting tons of compute.
        
           | eproxus wrote:
           | But please, think of the shareholders!
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | As with diffusion models in general, the point isn't the
           | specific example but that it's generalisable.
           | 
           | 5 million frames of video data with corresponding
           | accelerometer data, and you get this for genuine
           | photorealism.
        
             | gjulianm wrote:
             | Generalisable how? The model completely hallucinates
             | invalid input, it's not even high quality and required CSGO
             | to work. What's the output you expect from this and what
             | alternatives are there?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | It did not _require_ CSGO, that was simply one of their
               | examples. The very first video in the link shows a bunch
               | of classic Arati games, and even the video which is
               | showing CSGO is captioned  "DIAMOND's diffusion world
               | model can also be trained to simulate 3D environments,
               | such as CounterStrike: Global Offensive (CSGO)" -- I draw
               | your attention to "such as" being used rather than
               | "only".
               | 
               | And I thought I was fairly explicit about video data, but
               | just in case that's ambiguous: the stuff you record with
               | your phone camera set to video mode, synchronised with
               | the accelerometer data instead of player keyboard inputs.
               | 
               | As for output, with the model as it currently stands, I'd
               | expect a 24h training video at 60fps to be "photorealisic
               | and with similar weird hallucinations". Which is still
               | interesting, even without combining this with a control
               | net like Stable Diffusion can do.
        
               | empath75 wrote:
               | You do the same thing at a larger scale, and instead of
               | video game footage you use a few million hours of remote
               | controlled drone input in the real world.
        
           | nuz wrote:
           | "What would be the point of creating a shooter set in the
           | middle east? We already have pong and donkey kong"
        
           | stale2002 wrote:
           | To answer your question directly, the benefit is that we
           | could make something different from counter strike.
           | 
           | You see, there are these things called "proof of concept"s
           | that are meant to not be a product, but instead show off
           | capabilities.
           | 
           | Counterstrike is an example, meant to show off complex
           | capabilities. It is not meant to show how the useful thing of
           | these models is to literally recreate counterstrike.
        
             | gjulianm wrote:
             | Which capabilities are being shown off here? The ability to
             | take an already existing world-model and take lots of
             | compute to have a worse, less correct model?
        
               | stale2002 wrote:
               | The capability to have mostly working, real time
               | generation of images that represent a world model.
               | 
               | If that capability is possible, then it could be possible
               | to take 100 examples of seperate world models that exist,
               | and then combine those world models together in
               | interesting ways.
               | 
               | Combining together world models is an obvious next step
               | (IE, not showed off in this proof of concept. But it is a
               | logical/plausible future capability).
               | 
               | Having multiple world models combined together in new and
               | interesting ways, is almost like creating an entirely new
               | world model, even though thats not exactly the same.
        
         | cs702 wrote:
         | Came here to say pretty much the same thing, and saw your
         | comment.
         | 
         | The rate of progress has been mind-blowing indeed.
         | 
         | We sure live in interesting times!
        
       | w-m wrote:
       | If you're not bored with it yet, here's a Deep Dive (NotebookLM,
       | generated podcast). I fed it the project page, the arXiv paper,
       | the GitHub page, and the two twitter threads by the authors.
       | 
       | https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/a240cb12-8ca1-41b4-ab...
       | (7m59s)
       | 
       | As always, it's not actually much of a technical deep dive, but
       | gives a quite decent overview of the pieces involved, and its
       | applications.
        
         | thierrydamiba wrote:
         | How did you get the output to be so long? My podcasts are 3
         | mins max...
        
           | w-m wrote:
           | Oh wow, really? Even if you feed it whole research papers?
           | The ones I tried until now were more in the 8-10 minute
           | range. I haven't looked in to how to control the output yet.
           | Hopefully that'll get a little more transparent and
           | controllable soon.
        
       | ThouYS wrote:
       | I don't really understand the intuition on why this helps RL. The
       | original game has a lot more detail, why can't it be used
       | directly?
        
         | FeepingCreature wrote:
         | In the real world, you can't just boot up a copy of reality to
         | play out strategies. You need an internal model.
        
           | tourmalinetaco wrote:
           | So, effectively, these video game models are proof-of-
           | concepts to say "we can make models with extremely accurate
           | predictions using minimal resources"?
        
             | vbezhenar wrote:
             | May be I'm wrong but my understanding is that you can film
             | some area using, say, dashcams and then generate this kind
             | of neuro model. Then you can train robot to walk in this
             | area with this neuro-model. It can perform billions of
             | training sessions without touching physical world.
             | Alternatively you can somehow perform 3D scan of area,
             | recreate its 3D model and use, say, game engine to
             | simulate, but that probably requires more effort and not
             | necessarily better.
        
               | usrusr wrote:
               | And the leg motions we sometimes see in sleeping dogs
               | suggest that this is very much a way how having dreams is
               | useful!
        
             | usrusr wrote:
             | Not sure where you see the "minimal resources" here? But
             | I'd just counter all questions about "why" with the blanket
             | response of "for understanding natural intelligence": the
             | way biology innovates is that it throws everything against
             | the wall and not pick the one thing that sticks as the
             | winner and focus on that mechanism, it keeps the sticky
             | bits and also everything else as long as their cost isn't
             | prohibitive. Symbolic modeling ("this is an object that can
             | fall down"), prediction chains based on visual similarity
             | patterns (this), hardwired reflexes (we tend to not trust
             | anything that looks and moves like a spider or snake) and
             | who knows what else, it's all there, it all runs in
             | parallel, invited or not, and they all influence each other
             | in subtle and less subtle ways. The interaction is not
             | engineered, it's more like crosstalk that's allowed to
             | happen and has more upside than downside, or else evolution
             | would have preferred variations of the setup that have less
             | of the kind of crosstalk in question. But in our quest to
             | understand us, it's super exciting to see candidates for
             | processes that perhaps play some role in our minds, in
             | isolation, no matter if that role is big or small.
        
             | empath75 wrote:
             | Yes, this is exactly right. What they need is a giant
             | dataset of agent data and audio and video from real world
             | locomotion.
        
         | jampekka wrote:
         | It is used as a predictive model of the environment for model-
         | based RL. I.e. agents can predict consequences of their
         | actions.
        
           | ThouYS wrote:
           | Oh, I see. I was somehow under the impression that the
           | simulation was the game the RL agent learns to play (which
           | kinda seemed nonsensical).
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | It can use the game directly but if you try this with real life
         | robots, then it is better to do neural simulation before
         | performing an action that could result in injury or damage. We
         | don't need to fall with our cars off the road many times to
         | learn to drive on the road because we can imagine the
         | consequences. Same thing here.
        
       | snickerer wrote:
       | I see where this is going.
       | 
       | The next step to create training data is a real human with a
       | bodycam. There is only the need to connect the real body movement
       | (step forward, turning left, etc) to typical keyboard and mouse
       | game control events, to feed them into the model, too.
       | 
       | I think that is what the devs here are dreaming about.
        
         | devttyeu wrote:
         | The "We live in a simulation" argument just started looking a
         | lot more conceivable.
        
           | iwontberude wrote:
           | Not really because is it simulators all the way down?
           | Simulation theory explains nothing and only adds more
           | unexplainable phenomenon.
        
           | tiborsaas wrote:
           | I'm already very suspicious, we just got the same room number
           | in the third hotel in a row. Someone got lazy with the
           | details :)
        
         | devttyeu wrote:
         | Could probably make a decent dataset from VR headset tracking
         | cameras + motion sensors + passthrough output + decoded hand
         | movements
        
         | CaptainFever wrote:
         | Or a cockpit cam for the world's most realistic flight
         | simulator. /lighthearted
        
       | delusional wrote:
       | I just checked it out right quick. It works perfectly well on an
       | AMD card with ROCM pytorch.
       | 
       | It seems decent in short bursts. As it goes on it quite quickly
       | loses detail and the weapon has a tendency to devolve into
       | colorful garbage. I would also like to point out that none of the
       | videos show what happens when you walk into a wall. It doesn't
       | handle it very gracefully.
        
       | thenthenthen wrote:
       | When my game starts to look like this, I know it is time to quit
       | hahha, maybe a helpful tool in gaming addiction therapy? The
       | morphing of the gun/skins and the environment (the sandbags) wow.
       | Would like to play this and see what happens when you walk
       | backwards, turn around quick, use 'noclip' :D
        
       | DrSiemer wrote:
       | Where it gets really interesting is if we can train a model on
       | the latest GTA, plus maybe related real life footage, and then
       | use it to live upgrade the visuals of an old game like Vice City.
       | 
       | The lack of temporal consistency will still make it feel pretty
       | dreamlike, but it won't matter that much, because the base is
       | consistent and it will look amazing.
        
         | davedx wrote:
         | A game like GTA has way too much functionality and complex
         | branching for this to work I think (beyond eg doing aimless
         | drives around the city -- which would be very cool though)
        
           | DrSiemer wrote:
           | Gta 5 has everything Vice City has and more. In the Doom AI
           | dream it's possible to shoot people. Maybe in this CS model
           | as well?
           | 
           | I think the model does not have to know anything about the
           | functionality. It can just dream up what is most probable to
           | happen based on the training data.
        
         | InsideOutSanta wrote:
         | Just redrawing images drawn by an existing game engine works,
         | and generates amazing results, although like you point out,
         | temporal consistency is not great. It might interpret the low-
         | res green pixels on a far-away mountain as fruit trees in one
         | frame, and as pines in the next.
         | 
         | Here's a demo from 2021 doing something like that:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rYosbwXm1w
        
         | sorenjan wrote:
         | In addition to the sibling comment's older example there's new
         | work done with GTA too.
         | 
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1fx6zdr/gta_iv_wit...
        
           | DrSiemer wrote:
           | Cool! Looks fairly consistent as well.
           | 
           | I wonder if this type of AI upscaling could eventually also
           | fix things like slightly janky animations, but I guess that
           | would be pretty hard without predetermined input and some
           | form of look ahead.
           | 
           | Limiting character motion to only allow correct, natural
           | movement would introduce a strange kind of input lag.
        
             | sorenjan wrote:
             | Nvidia has done work in AI driven character animation too.
             | 
             | https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-
             | demand/session/gtcspring22-d...
        
         | skydhash wrote:
         | Why not just creating the assets with higher resolution?
        
           | DrSiemer wrote:
           | Because that is a lot more work, will only work for a single
           | game, potentially requires more resources to run and will not
           | get you the same level of realism.
        
         | taneq wrote:
         | Using it as a visual upgrade is pretty close to what DLSS does
         | so that sounds plausible.
        
         | empath75 wrote:
         | People focusing on the use of this in video games baffles me.
         | The point isn't that it can regenerate a videogame world, the
         | point is that it can simulate the _real world_. They're using
         | video game footage to train it because it's cheap and easy to
         | synthesize the data they need. This system doesn't know it's
         | simulating a game. You can give it thousands or millions of
         | hours of real world footage and agent input and get a
         | simulation of the real world.
        
       | mixtureoftakes wrote:
       | this is crazy
       | 
       | when trying to run on a mac it only plays in a very small window,
       | how could this be configured?
        
       | mk_stjames wrote:
       | This was Schmidhuber's group is 2018:
       | 
       | https://worldmodels.github.io/
       | 
       | Just want to point that out.
        
         | afh1 wrote:
         | Ahead of its time for sure. Dream is an accurate term here,
         | that driving scene does resemble driving in dreams.
        
       | jmchambers wrote:
       | I _think_ I understand the basic premise behind stable diffusion,
       | i.e., reverse the denoising process to generate realistic images
       | but, as far as I know, this is always done at the pixel level. Is
       | there any research attempting to do this at the 3D asset level,
       | i.e., subbing in game engine assets (with position and
       | orientation) until a plausible scene is recreated? If it were
       | possible to do it that way, couldn't it "dream" up real maps,
       | with real physics, and so avoid the somewhat noisy output these
       | types of demo generate?
        
         | desdenova wrote:
         | I think the closest we have right now is 3D gaussian splatting.
         | 
         | So far it's only been used to train a scene from photographs
         | from multiple angles and rebuild it volumetrically by adjusting
         | densities in a point-cloud.
         | 
         | But it might be possible to train a model on multiple different
         | scenes, and perform diffusion on a random point cloud to
         | generate new scenes.
         | 
         | Rendering a point cloud in real time is also very efficient, so
         | it could be used to create insanely realistic game worlds
         | instead of polygonal geometry.
         | 
         | It seems someone already thought of that:
         | https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2311.11221
        
           | jmchambers wrote:
           | Interesting, I guess that takes things even further and
           | removes the need for hand-crafted 3D assets altogether, which
           | is probably how things will end up going in gaming, long-
           | term.
           | 
           | I was suggesting a more modest approach, I guess, one where
           | the reverse-denoising process involves picking and placing
           | existing 3D assets, e.g., those in GTA 5, so that the process
           | is actually building a plausible map, using those 3D assets,
           | but on the fly...
           | 
           | Turn your car right and a plausible street decorated with
           | buildings, trees and people is dreamt up by the algorithm.
           | All the lighting and physics would still be done in-engine,
           | with stable diffusion acting as a dynamic map creator, with
           | an inherent knowledge of how to decorate a street with a
           | plausible mix of assets.
           | 
           | I suppose it could form the basis of a procedurally generated
           | game world where, given the same random seed, it could
           | generate whole cities or landscapes that would be the same on
           | each player's machine. Just an idea...
        
             | skydhash wrote:
             | The thing is that, there are generators that can do exactly
             | this, no need to have an LLM as the middle man. Things like
             | terrain generation, city generation, crowd control,
             | character generation, can be done quite easily with far
             | less compute and energy.
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | Technically I guess one could do a stable diffusion-like
           | model except on voxels, where instead of pixel intensity
           | values it producing a scalar field which you could turn into
           | geometry using marching cubes or something similar.
           | 
           | Not sure how efficient that would be though, and would only
           | work for assets like teapots and whatnot, not whole game maps
           | say.
        
         | gliptic wrote:
         | > I _think_ I understand the basic premise behind stable
         | diffusion, i.e., reverse the denoising process to generate
         | realistic images but, as far as I know, this is always done at
         | the pixel level.
         | 
         | It's typically not done at the pixel level, but at the "latent
         | space" level of e.g. a VAE. The image generation is done in
         | this space, which has fewer outputs than the pixels of the
         | final image, and then converted to the pixels using the VAE.
        
           | jmchambers wrote:
           | Frantically Googles VAE...
           | 
           | Ah, okay, so the work is done at a different level of
           | abstraction, didn't know that. But I guess it's still a
           | pixel-related abstraction, and it is converted back to pixels
           | to generate the final image?
           | 
           | I suppose in my proposed (and probably implausible)
           | algorithm, that different level of abstraction might be
           | loosely analogous to collections of related game engine
           | assets that are often used together, so that the denoising
           | algorithm might be effectively saying things like "we'll put
           | some building-related assets here-ish, and some park-related
           | flora assets over here...", and then that gets crystallised
           | in to actual placement of individual assets in the post-
           | processing step.
        
             | StevenWaterman wrote:
             | (High level, specifics are definitely wrong here)
             | 
             | The VAE isn't really pixel-level, it's semantic-level. The
             | most significant bits in the encoding are like "how light
             | or dark is the image" and then towards the other end bits
             | represent more niche things like "if it's an image of a
             | person, make them wear glasses". This is way more efficient
             | than using raw pixels because it's so heavily compressed,
             | there's less data. This was one of the big breakthroughs of
             | stable diffusion compared to previous efforts like disco
             | diffusion that work on the pixel level.
             | 
             | The VAE encodes and decodes images automatically. It's not
             | something that's written, it's trained to understand the
             | semantics of the images in the same way other neural nets
             | are.
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | Generating this at pixel level _is_ the next level thing. The
         | reverse engineering method your described is probably appealing
         | because it 's easier to understand.
         | 
         | Focusing on pixel level generation is the right approach I
         | think. The somewhat noisy output will be improved upon probably
         | in a short timeframe. Now that they proved with Doom
         | (https://gamengen.github.io/) and this that it's possible,
         | probably more research is happening currently to nail the
         | correct architecture to scale this to HD and minimal
         | hallucination. It happened with videos alredy so we should see
         | a similar level breakthrough soon.
        
         | jampekka wrote:
         | Not exactly 3D assets, but diffusion modems are used to
         | generate e.g. traffic (vehicle trajectories) for evaluating
         | autonomous vehicle algorithms. These vehicles tend to crash
         | quite a lot.
         | 
         | For example https://github.com/NVlabs/CTG
         | 
         | Edit: fixed link
        
         | furyofantares wrote:
         | > but, as far as I know, this is always done at the pixel level
         | 
         | Image models are NOT denoised at the pixel level - diffusion
         | happens in latent space. This was one of the big breakthroughs
         | that made all of this work well.
         | 
         | There's a model for encoding/decoding between pixels and latent
         | space. Latent space is able to encode whatever concepts it
         | needs in whichever of its dimensions it needs, and is generally
         | lower dimensional than pixel space. So we get a noisy latent
         | space, denoise it using the diffusion model, then use the other
         | model (variational autoencoder) to decode into pixel space.
        
       | marcyb5st wrote:
       | So, this is pretty exciting.
       | 
       | I can how this can already be used to generate realistic physics
       | approximations in a game engine. You create a bunch of snippets
       | of gameplay using a much heavier and realistic physics engine
       | (perhaps even CGI). The model learn to approximate the physics
       | and boom, now you have a lightweight physics engine. Perhaps you
       | can even have several that are specialized (e.g. one for smoke
       | dynamics, one for explosions, ...). Even if it allucinates,
       | wouldn't be worse than the physics bugs that are so common in
       | games.
        
         | hobs wrote:
         | A physics bug would be a consistent problem you can fix.
         | There's no such guarantee about an ML model. This would likely
         | only be ok in the context of a game specifically made to be
         | janky.
        
           | kqr wrote:
           | This obsession people have with determinism! I'd much rather
           | take a low rate of weird bugs than common consistent ones. I
           | don't believe reproducibility of bugs makes for better
           | gameplay generally.
        
             | paulryanrogers wrote:
             | Reproducibility does make bugs more likely to be fixed, or
             | at least fixable.
             | 
             | Also, games introduce randomness in a controlled way so
             | users don't get frustrated by it appearing in unexpected
             | places. I don't want characters to randomly appear and
             | disappear. It's fine if bullet trajectory varies more
             | randomly as they get further away.
        
               | skydhash wrote:
               | Also most engines have been worked on for years. So more
               | often than not, core elements like audio, physics,
               | input,... are very stable and the remaining bugs are
               | either "can't fix" or "won't fix".
        
             | NotMichaelBay wrote:
             | It might be fine for casual players, but it would prevent
             | serious and pro players from getting into the game. In
             | Counter-Strike, for example, pro players (and other serious
             | players) practice specific grenade throws so they can use
             | them reliably in matches.
        
               | kqr wrote:
               | I'm not saying one can make specifically Counter-Strike
               | on a non-deterministic engine -- that seems like
               | strawmanning my argument.
               | 
               | People play and enjoy many games with varying levels of
               | randomness as a fundamental component, some even
               | professionally (poker, stock market). This could be made
               | such a game.
        
               | monsieurbanana wrote:
               | Either the physics engine matter, in which case you want
               | a deterministic engine as you said, or it doesn't like in
               | a poker game and you don't want to spend much resources
               | (manpower, computer cycles) into it.
               | 
               | Which also means an off-the-shelf deterministic engine.
        
             | mrob wrote:
             | The whole hobby of speedrunning relies heavily on
             | exploiting deterministic game bugs.
        
             | hobs wrote:
             | Make a fun game with this as a premise and I will try it,
             | but it sounds just an annoying concept.
        
             | dartos wrote:
             | You don't play a lot of games, huh?
             | 
             | Consistent bugs you can anticipate and play/work around,
             | random ones you can't. Just look at pretty much any speed
             | running community for games before 1995.
             | 
             | Say goodbye to any real competitive scene with random
             | unfixable potentially one off bugs.
        
           | fullstackwife wrote:
           | This is one of the fallacies of current AI research space:
           | they don't focus on the end-user too much. In this case the
           | end-user would be the gamer, and while playing games you
           | expect a valid gameplay, so those kind of hallucinations are
           | not acceptable, while I'm pretty sure they give the AI
           | research authors a strong dopamine trigger. We have a hammer
           | and now we are looking for a nail, while you should ask a
           | question first: what is the problem we are trying to solve
           | here?
           | 
           | Real world usage will be probably different, and maybe even
           | unexpected by the authors of this research.
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | > This is one of the fallacies of current AI research
             | space: they don't focus on the end-user too much. In this
             | case the end-user would be the gamer
             | 
             | Or from another angle the end-user is a game developer
             | trying to actually work with this kind of technology, which
             | is just a nightmarish prospect. Nobody in the industry is
             | asking for a game engine that runs entirely on vibes and
             | dream logic, gamedev is already chaotic enough when
             | everything is laid out in explicit code and data.
        
             | badpun wrote:
             | The whole purpose of academia is literally to nerd out on
             | cool, impractical things, which will ocasionally turn out
             | to have some real-life relevance years or decades later.
             | This (hallucinated CS) is still more relevant to real world
             | than 99% of what happens in academic research.
        
               | dartos wrote:
               | Yes to the first part, no to the random "99% useless"
               | number you made up.
               | 
               | I'm no fan of academia, but it undeniably produces useful
               | and meaningful knowledge regularly.
        
             | stale2002 wrote:
             | > they don't focus on the end-user too much.
             | 
             | Of course they don't. Stuff like this is a proof of
             | concept.
             | 
             | If they had a product that worked, they wouldn't be in
             | academia. Instead, they would leave the world of research
             | and create a multi billion dollar company.
             | 
             | Almost by definition, anything in academia isn't going to
             | be productized, because if it was, then the researchers
             | would just stop researching and make a bunch of money
             | selling the product to consumers.
             | 
             | Such research is still useful for society, though, as it
             | means that someone else can spend the millions and millions
             | of dollars making a better version and then selling that.
        
         | monsieurbanana wrote:
         | > Even if it allucinates, wouldn't be worse than the physics
         | bugs that are so common in games.
         | 
         | I don't know about that. Physic bugs are common, but you can
         | prioritize and fix the worst (gamebreaking) ones. If you have a
         | blackbox model, it becomes much harder to do that.
        
         | Thorrez wrote:
         | Would that work for multiplayer? If it's a visual effect only,
         | I guess it would be ok. But if it affects gameplay, wouldn't
         | different players get different results?
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | Well, it doesn't make sense to use this exact model - this is
           | just demonstration that it can learn world model from pixels.
           | 
           | An obvious next step towards a more playable game is to add
           | state vector to the inputs of the model: it is easier to
           | learn to render the world from pixels + state vectors than
           | from pixels alone.
           | 
           | Then it depends what we want to do. If we want normal Counter
           | Strike gameplay but with new graphics, we can keep existing
           | CS game server and train only the rendering part.
           | 
           | If you want to make Dream-Counter-Strike where rules are more
           | bendable then you might want to train state update model...
        
         | twic wrote:
         | Do you think that inference on a thirteen million parameter
         | neural network is more lightweight than running a conventional
         | physics engine?
        
           | epolanski wrote:
           | Every software that can be implemented in a JavaScript, ehm,
           | LLM, will eventually be implemented in an LLM.
        
             | kendalf89 wrote:
             | Are you predicting node.llm right now?
        
           | procgen wrote:
           | Convincing liquid physics (e.g. surf interacting with a
           | beach, rocks, the player character) might be a good
           | candidate.
        
           | tiagod wrote:
           | In some cases, the model will be lighter. There is no need
           | for 14M parameters for physics simulations, and there's a lot
           | of promising work in that area.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | > boom, now you have a lightweight physics engine
         | 
         | lightweight, but producing several hundred watts of heat.
        
         | bobsomers wrote:
         | What makes you think the network inference is less expensive?
         | Newtonian physics is already extremely well known and pretty
         | computationally efficient to compute.
         | 
         | How would a "function approximation" of Newtonian physics, with
         | billions of parameters, be cheaper to compute?
         | 
         | It seems like this would both be more expensive and less
         | correct than a proper physics simulation.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Yeah, I definitely wouldn't trust it to replace basic physics
         | of running, jumping, bullets, objects shattering, etc.
         | 
         | But it seems extremely promising for fiery explosions, smoke,
         | and _especially_ water. Anything with dynamics that are
         | essentially complex.
         | 
         | Also for lighting -- both to get things like skin right with
         | subsurface scattering, as well as global ray-traced lighting.
         | 
         | You can train specific lightweight models for these things, and
         | they important thing is that their output is correct at the
         | macro level. E.g., a tree should be casting a shadow that looks
         | like the right shadow at the right angle for that type of tree
         | and its types of leaves and general shape. Nobody cares if each
         | individual leaf shadow corresponds to an individual leaf 10
         | feet above or is just hallucinated.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | This video https://x.com/Sentdex/status/1845146540555243615 looks
       | way too much like my dreams. This is almost exactly that happens
       | when I sometimes try to jump high, it transforms me to a
       | different place just like that. Things keep changing _just like
       | that_. It 's amazing to see how close it is to a real dream
       | experience.
        
         | kleene_op wrote:
         | I noticed that all text looked garbled up when I had some lucid
         | dreams. When diffusion models started to gain attention, I made
         | the connection that text generated in generated images also
         | looked garbled up.
         | 
         | Maybe all of those are clues that parts of the human
         | subconscious mind operate pretty close to the principles behind
         | diffusion models.
        
           | sci_prog wrote:
           | Also the AI generated images that can't get the fingers
           | right. Have you ever tried to look at your hands while lucid
           | dreaming and try counting fingers? There are some really
           | interesting parallels between the dreams and diffusion
           | models.
        
             | dartos wrote:
             | Of course, due to the very nature of dreams, your awareness
             | of diffusion models and their output flavors how you
             | perceive even past dreams.
             | 
             | Our brains love retroactively altering fuzzy memories.
        
               | hombre_fatal wrote:
               | On the other hand, psychedelics give you perceptions
               | similar to even early deepdream genai images.
               | 
               | On LSD, I was swimming in my friend's pool (for six
               | hours...) amazed at all the patterns on his pool tiles
               | underwater. I couldn't get enough. Every tile had a
               | different sophisticated pattern.
               | 
               | The next day I went back to his place (sober) and
               | commented on how cool his pool tiles were. He had nfi
               | what I was talking about.
               | 
               | I walk out to the pool and sure enough it's just a grid
               | of small featureless white tiles. Upon closer inspection
               | they have a slight grain to them. I guess my brain was
               | connecting the dots on the grain and creating patterns.
               | 
               | It was quite a trip to be so wrong about reality.
               | 
               | Not really related to your claim I guess but I haven't
               | thought of this story in 10 years and don't want to
               | delete it.
        
               | Jackson__ wrote:
               | This may be a joke, but counting your fingers to lucid
               | dream has been a thing for a lot longer than diffusion
               | models.
               | 
               | That being said, your reality will influence your dreams
               | if you're exposed to some things enough. I used to play
               | minecraft on a really bad PC back in the day, and in my
               | lucid dreams I used to encounter the same slow chunk
               | loading as I saw in the game.
        
           | smusamashah wrote:
           | I also lucid dream occasionally. Very rarely things are very
           | detailed, most often the colors and details are just as bleak
           | and blurry and keep changing as these videos. I walk down a
           | street, take a turn (or not), its almost guaranteed I can't
           | go back to where I came from. I usually appreciate when I can
           | track back the same path.
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | I don't think lucid dreaming is a requirement for this.
           | Whenever I dream my environment morphs into another one,
           | scene by scene, things I try to get details from, like the
           | content of a text, refuse to show clearly enough to extract
           | any meaningful information from it, no matter what I try.
        
         | thegabriele wrote:
         | We are unconsciously (pun intended) implementing how brains
         | work both in dream and wake states. Can't wait until we add
         | some kind of (lossless) memory to this models.
        
           | hackernewds wrote:
           | Any evidence to back this lofty claim?
        
             | sweeter wrote:
             | vibes
        
           | soraki_soladead wrote:
           | We have lossless memory for models today. That's the training
           | data. You could consider this the offline version of a replay
           | buffer which is also typically lossless.
           | 
           | The online, continuous and lossy version of this problem is
           | more like how our memory works and still largely unsolved.
        
         | earnesti wrote:
         | That looks way too much to the one time I did DMT-5
        
           | TechDebtDevin wrote:
           | Machine Elves
        
         | jvanderbot wrote:
         | This is why I'm excited in a limited way. Clearly something is
         | disconnected in a dream state that has an analogous disconnect
         | here.
         | 
         | I think these models lack a world model, something with strong
         | spatial reasoning and continuity expectations that animals
         | have.
         | 
         | Of course that's probably learned too.
        
         | siavosh wrote:
         | What's amazing is that if you really start paying attention it
         | seems like the mind is often doing the same thing when you're
         | awake, less noticeable with your visual field but more
         | noticeable with attention and thoughts themselves.
        
           | smusamashah wrote:
           | This is a very interesting thought. I never thought of mind
           | doing anything like that in wake state. I know I will now be
           | thinking about this idea every time I recall those dreams.
        
             | TaylorAlexander wrote:
             | Yeah I also hadn't but it makes sense. Just like all output
             | from an LLM is a "hallucination" but we have a tendency to
             | only call it a hallucination when something looks wrong
             | about the result, we forget that our conscious lived
             | experience is a hallucination based on a bunch of abstract
             | sensory data that our brain fuses in to a world state
             | experience. It's obvious when we are asleep that dreams are
             | hallucinations, but it is less obvious that the conscious
             | experience is too.
        
       | iwontberude wrote:
       | This is crazy looking, I know it's basically useless but it's
       | cool anyways.
        
       | shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
       | As I used to play CS 1.6 and CS: GO in my free time before the
       | pandemic, this playable CS diffusion world map has been trained
       | by a noob player for research purposes.
       | 
       | After reading the comments I can assume that if you play outside
       | of the scope it was trained on, the game loses its functionality.
       | 
       | Nevertheless, R&D for a good cause is something we all admire.
        
         | crossroadsguy wrote:
         | How is the last version CS 2.0 (I think)? It's been free to
         | play like GO I guess. Is it like GO where physics felt too
         | dramatised (could just be my opinion)? Or realistic in a snappy
         | way like 1.6?
        
           | shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
           | Honestly, I heard about CS 2.0 from you. And you are right
           | what you just said about GO.
        
       | Zealotux wrote:
       | Could we imagine parts of game elements to become "targets" for
       | models? For example hair and fur physics have been notoriously
       | difficult to nail, but it should be easier to use AI to simulate
       | some fake physics on top of the rendered frame, right? Is anyone
       | working on that?
        
       | gadders wrote:
       | Cool achievement, but I want AI to give me smarter NPCs, not
       | simulate the map.
        
         | thelastparadise wrote:
         | The NPCs need a model of the world in their brain in order to
         | act normal.
        
       | styfle wrote:
       | But does it work on macOS?
       | 
       | (The latest CS removed support for macOS)
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | I wonder if there is some way to combine this with a language
       | model, or somehow have the language model in the same latent
       | space or something.
       | 
       | Is that was vision-language models already do? Somehow all of the
       | language should be grounded in the world model. For models like
       | Gemini that can answer questions about video, it must have some
       | level of this grounding already.
       | 
       | I don't understand how this stuff works, but compressing
       | everything to one dimension as in a language model for processing
       | seems inefficient. The reason our language is serial is because
       | we can only make one sound at a time.
       | 
       | But suppose the "game" trained on was a structural engineering
       | tool. The user asks about some scenario for a structure and
       | somehow that language is converted to an input visualization of
       | the "game state". Maybe some constraints to be solved for are
       | encoded also somehow as part of that initial state.
       | 
       | Then when it's solved (by an agent trained through reinforcement
       | learning that uses each dreamed game state as input?), the result
       | "game state" is converted somehow back into language and combined
       | with the original user query to provide an answer.
       | 
       | But if I understand properly, the biggest utility of this is that
       | there is a network that understands how the world works, and that
       | part of the network can be utilized for predicting useful actions
       | or maybe answering questions etc. ?
        
         | LarsDu88 wrote:
         | To combine with a language model simply replace the action
         | vector with a language model latent.
         | 
         | Alternative as of last year there are now purely diffusion
         | based text decoder models
        
         | empath75 wrote:
         | Not everything needs to be a single giant neural network. You
         | could have a bunch of weakly coupled specialized networks
         | sending data back and forth over a normal api.
        
       | LarsDu88 wrote:
       | Iterative denoising diffusion is such a hurdle for getting this
       | sort of thing running at reasonable fps
        
       | akomtu wrote:
       | The current batch of ML models looks a lot like filling in holes
       | in the wall of text, drawings or movies: you erase a part of the
       | wall and tell it to fix it. And it fills in the hole using colors
       | from the nearby walls in the kitchen and similar walls and we
       | watch this in awe thinking it must've figured out the design
       | rules of the kitchen. However what it's really done is it
       | interpolated the gaps with some sort of basic functions,
       | trigonometric polynomials for example, and it used thousands of
       | those. This solution wouldn't occur to us because our limited
       | memory isn't enough for thousands of polynomials: we have to find
       | a compact set of rules or give up entirely. So when these ML
       | models predict the motion of planets, they approximate the
       | Newton's law with a long series of basic functions.
        
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