arXiv Machine Learning

CausalDreamer: Learning Predictive World Models with Latent Disentanglement

CausalDreamer enhances generative world models by freezing the original video tokenizer and re-encoding its latent space into a factored representation that separates controllable versus uncontrollable dynamics and reward-relevant versus reward-irrelevant information. The pretrained dynamics model is fine‑tuned to predict this factored representation, enabling more accurate model‑predictive planning. On the MMBench2 benchmark, CausalDreamer improves normalized scores by 14% on clean tasks and 25% on manipulated variants compared to the baseline, while both models perform poorly on entirely new environments.

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

FIRM-WM: State-factorized factual-interventional recurrent modeling for reward-free visual planning

FIRM-WM is a compact pixel world model that separates a goal‑comparable configuration from a 128‑dimensional dynamic fiber, enabling reward‑free visual planning from offline videos. It addresses two key mismatches: aligning planning states with goal images and reconciling factual trajectories with interventional sampling. In experiments, FIRM‑WM achieves high success rates on TwoRoom, Reacher, and OGBench‑Cube while using fewer parameters and faster planning times than prior models.

By Yilun Wu, Yunjian Zhang, Aobo Li, Mujiangshan Wang, Haitao Wu, Aqiang Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Dueling World Models: Advantage-Style Action Channels for Common-Mode Distractor Rejection

arXiv:2608. 06706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent world models plan by predicting future states from an action, but when a scene contains motion the agent does not control, they quietly go action-blind: predictions for different actions become indistinguishable even as the training loss keeps improving.

By Jiazhuo Li, Yiming Fei, Zhiruo Zhou, Heikichi Hayashi
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Reconciling Process Supervision with Outcome-Based Credit in Agentic Policy Optimization

The paper introduces TASPO, a method that transforms privileged information (PI) into outcome‑grounded action credit for language‑model agents. TASPO constructs decision‑applicable PI from verified successful experience, aggregates PI‑induced likelihood shifts at the executable‑action level, and converts relative action support into positive, bounded, mean‑preserving weights on the original trajectory advantage. Experiments on three agentic benchmarks show TASPO improves over GRPO by 10.6% and generalizes better to unseen tasks, while reducing supervision mismatch and stabilizing policy optimization.

By Jingxiao Yang, Wangjie Gan, Yingxuan Zhuang, Wenqi Zhang, Jintao Chen, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

What Pretraining and Midtraining Make Learnable from Rewards?

The paper investigates how pretraining and midtraining enable reward-based learning by providing necessary information and computation. It analyzes sequential state computation and contextual memory, showing that task‑independent source observations resolve ambiguities in reward adaptation. Experiments on pretrained Qwen2.5 checkpoints across eight worlds demonstrate that correct source and first‑operation supervision significantly improve success rates, and that memory replay and independent confirmation further enhance performance.

By Chiwun Yang, Xiaoyu Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

The Intervention Gap in Latent World Models

The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.

By Donna Vakalis