arXiv AI

Dual-Frontier: When Can an Agent Trust Its World Model?

The paper introduces Dual-Frontier, a learning principle that determines when an agent should trust its world model for decision-making. It formalizes the failure-attribution problem as a counterfactual decomposition of return loss and shows that its components cannot be identified from passive interaction, even for finite-horizon planners. Dual-Frontier allows a model‑guided decision only when the predicted advantage exceeds a certified bound on decision‑relevant world‑model error; otherwise, the agent focuses on verifying the model. The authors provide theoretical guarantees, adaptive evidence reuse, and experimental validation on controlled and realistic benchmarks, demonstrating improved decision quality and reliability.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Beyond Prediction: Steering VLM Agents with Retrospective World Modeling

The paper introduces Retrospective World Modeling, a new paradigm for vision‑language‑model (VLM) agents that allows them to reason backward by estimating which action most likely caused a state transition. It proposes the Self‑Consistency Reward (SCR), an intrinsic signal that measures how well a policy action aligns with this retrospective explanation, providing dense transition‑level feedback. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating SCR improves policy robustness and generalization compared to purely prospective world‑modeling approaches.

By Yongjiang Liu, Jie Zhang, Haoyue Zhang, Jingcai Guo, Deze Zeng, Song Guo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

A Control Theory of Predictability in Latent World Models

arXiv:2607. 10362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models are trained to predict future states in a learned representation and are then deployed inside a planner that selects actions by simulating them forward.

By Hanzhe You, Yonggang Zhang, Maohao Ran, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Wei Xue, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control

AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.

By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao