arXiv Computer Vision

World Models with Configurable Perception

arXiv AI
Aug 10

TaskSense: Focusing on What Matters in World Models

arXiv:2608. 06544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models for visual control typically learn compact latent states by reconstructing observations, implicitly encouraging representations to preserve information across the entire visual input.

By SM Mazharul Islam, Manfred Huber
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

JEPA-Bisim: Learning Robust Visual Representations for Planning with Joint-Embedding Predictive World Models

JEPA-Bisim introduces a bisimulation encoder to joint-embedding predictive world models, ensuring that states with similar transition dynamics are mapped to nearby latent representations while suppressing irrelevant slow features such as background changes and distractors. The approach improves robustness on navigation (PointMaze) and manipulation (PushT) tasks under varied test-time visual conditions, achieving up to tenfold smaller latent spaces than DINO-WM. It remains effective across different pre-trained visual encoders, including DINOv2, SimDINOv2, and iBOT.

By Leonardo F. Toso, Davit Shadunts, Yunyang Lu, Gloria Geng, Nihal Sharma, Donglin Zhan, Nam H. Nguyen, James Anderson
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

SearchWorld: Spatial Value-Grounded Imagination for UAV Object Search via World Models

SearchWorld introduces a recurrent state‑space world model that couples explicit spatial memory with value‑guided imagination for UAV object search. The model maintains bird’s‑eye‑view exploration and obstacle memory, decodes a task‑aware spatial value layer, and uses a cognition‑action network to improve policy through imagined rollouts without a separate critic. Experiments on UAV‑ON show a 23.8% success rate, surpassing the best published agent (19.5%) and achieving 35.5% oracle success while remaining robust on unseen scenes.

By Yatai Ji, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yong Zhao, Yue Hu, Fanglong Yao, Chen Gao, Pengfei Zhu, Quanjun Yin
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation

arXiv:2606. 04046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control.

By Boyuan Xiao, Bohong Chen, Yumeng Li, Ji Feng, Yao-Xiang Ding, Kun Zhou
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

StarWM: Self-Supervised Trained Attention Routing for Robust World Models

StarWM introduces a self‑supervised attention routing mechanism that selectively applies reconstruction only to dynamically relevant regions of visual input. By combining a cross‑attention module with a dual‑stream decoder and stop‑gradient barriers, it balances faithful environmental dynamics capture with abstraction of irrelevant content. Experiments on DeepMind Control show that StarWM outperforms both reconstruction‑based and reconstruction‑free baselines, especially under distractor conditions, and preserves state attributes over long‑horizon imagination.

By Zeqiang Zhang, Fabian Wurzberger, Maximilian Otte, Daniel Schmid, Sebastian Gottwald, Arne Peter Raulf, Daniel Alexander Braun
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Contrastive World Models

Contrastive World Models propose a new method for learning latent dynamics without pixel reconstruction. By replacing observation reconstruction with a Deep InfoMax-like objective that maximizes mutual information between state-action sequences and local patch features of future observations, the approach encourages state representations to retain predictive information while ignoring visually irrelevant details. Experiments show that this method matches existing baselines in simple settings and significantly outperforms them when distractors or natural video backgrounds are present, while also training more efficiently by eliminating the pixel decoder.

By Bonnie Li