Can Image Models Imagine Time? ImageTime: A Novel Benchmark for Probing Visual World Modeling Through Spatiotemporal Consistency

arXiv:2606.10620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image generation models now produce high-quality static images, yet their ability to represent how a visual world changes over time remains poorly understood. Practical workflows such as storyboarding, step-by-step illustration, reference-guided editing, and video previsualization require models to preserve identities, objects, spatial relations, and causal order across multiple visual states. Existing evaluations largely measure single-image correctness, compositional alignment, or video quality, leaving open whether an image model can coheren