arXiv Machine Learning

Does Depth Survive Composition, and Can a Router Use It? Adaptive Compute in Latent World Models

The paper investigates whether deeper predictor blocks in adaptive‑compute world models truly improve rollout accuracy and whether a router can select the appropriate depth per step. Experiments on nine DeepMind Control tasks show that deeper predictors do not always yield better accuracy, and that a greedy oracle selecting depth per step can reduce error by up to 37% compared to fixed‑depth mixtures, yet no trained router achieves this advantage. The study also finds that supervising early exits only at the first rollout step can mitigate depth‑inversion issues observed in some tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

One-Step Prediction Fidelity Is a Poor Proxy for Planning Performance in JEPA World Models

The paper challenges the common practice of selecting latent world models based on one‑step prediction loss, arguing that this metric poorly predicts planning performance. Using a frozen‑decoder protocol, the authors decompose one‑step error into encoder‑inherent and predictor‑added components and evaluate goal‑conditioned planning across three continuous‑control environments. Their experiments show that improvements in one‑step fidelity do not correlate with planning success, with correlation coefficients near zero and inconsistent exchange rates across tasks.

By Joshua Cheung, Zhang He
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Keeping JEPA World Models Plannable When Little of the Frame Moves

The paper introduces SLIM, a pushing benchmark that tests language‑based goal specification for latent world models. It shows that a vanilla LeWM fails almost entirely due to an action‑insensitive encoder, but adding an inverse‑dynamics auxiliary loss restores encoder sensitivity and dramatically improves success rates. With the repaired latent, a lightweight language‑goal head can plan from natural language sentences, achieving high performance on navigation and pushing tasks without retraining the world model.

By Florian Strohm, Patrick Wagner, Jannik Schwab, Marco Huber
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Selection-Safe Conformal Early Exit: Distribution-Free Coverage under Adaptive Depth

The paper introduces a selection‑safe conformal early‑exit method that calibrates a single split‑conformal quantile using a terminal‑path score derived from prefix maxima. This approach guarantees coverage for any data‑dependent stopping policy that preserves terminal‑set containment, without requiring an α/L correction. Empirical results on eight encoder backbones and CIFAR‑100 show that pathwise selection achieves higher macro coverage (0.901 vs. 0.814) with smaller set sizes and lower latency fractions compared to naive layer‑wise selection, and remains robust to deployment‑time budget changes.

By Adria Binte Habib, Ibne Farabi Shihab
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Think Shallow, Solve Deep: Controlling Recurrent Dynamics for Reliable Test-Time Depth

The paper investigates how the dynamical regime of recurrent-depth reasoners—whether they settle, drift, or remain marginal—affects the reliability of test‑time depth. It establishes a depth‑safety condition based on per‑step displacement relative to the decoder margin, showing that operators in a settling regime can safely increase depth without degrading performance and can even improve accuracy on harder unseen tasks such as Sudoku. The authors provide empirical evidence from algorithmic tasks trained on limited data, demonstrate the impact of a terminal fixed‑point objective on depth behavior, and offer operational criteria to identify useful test‑time depth while cataloguing failure modes.

By Ivan Viakhirev, Kirill Borodin, Amirah Almutairi, Serguei Barannikov, Maxim Abramov, Grach Mkrtchian
arXiv AI
1d ago

LEV: Thinking Fast and Deep with Looped Decision Models

LEV is a decision model that performs reasoning by looping its layers instead of generating text, allowing it to deepen its computation on a per-question basis. Trained jointly across all loop steps, a single LEV checkpoint can answer at any depth, improving accuracy—especially on hard questions—while keeping inference fast. On benchmark tests, LEV outperforms dense and cascade models by 5.4 to 8.8 accuracy points with sub‑50 ms latency, and on‑demand depth selection saves 15–24% of computation for minimal accuracy loss.

By Dingjie Song, Zhiling Yan, Yuxuan Zhang, Lichao Sun