arXiv AI

The Objective Is the Bottleneck: Latent World Models Encode What Their Planners Cannot Use

arXiv:2608. 12959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent world models are judged by how well they predict, so when planning fails at long horizons the natural reading is that the predictor degrades.

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
4d ago

Beyond a single latent space: a dual-latent world model for long-horizon planning

The paper introduces the Dual-Latent World Model (Dual-WM), which separates local execution and long-range planning into distinct latent spaces and dynamics models. A new learning method, Long-Horizon Representation Learning with Weighted Rollout (LoRe), supervises predictions at both levels using exponential horizon weights. Experiments on five goal-conditioned visual control tasks show that Dual-WM improves success rates over strong baselines, especially at longer horizons.

By Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Shaobin Zhuang, Junlin He, Xiaoyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Yuxin Liu, Limin Wang, Yali Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Aim Short to Reach Far: Your Frozen World Model Can Plan Better Than You Think

The paper demonstrates that planners using frozen visual world models can achieve better control by changing the target used for action scoring. Instead of scoring actions solely by distance to the final goal image, the authors propose Anchored Planning, which retrieves a recorded trajectory segment that matches the current and goal observations and then scores actions toward an intermediate observation shortly after the segment’s start. Experiments on Cube, PushT, Reacher, and TwoRoom show that this intermediate-target approach outperforms the released LeWM planner on all long‑range tasks, while simple final‑goal search fails to achieve the same gains.

By Xvyuan Liu, Jianjie Fang, Chen Gao, Yong Li
arXiv AI
6d ago

HaM-World: Soft-Hamiltonian World Models with Selective Memory for Planning

HaM-World introduces a structured world model that combines history-conditioned selective memory with a Soft‑Hamiltonian latent dynamics prior. The model decomposes the latent state into a canonical (q,p) subspace governed by an energy‑derived Hamiltonian vector field and a context subspace c capturing non‑conservative factors, while Mamba selective state‑space memory conditions the transition used for prediction, reward, value estimation, and planning. Across six DeepMind Control Suite tasks, HaM-World achieves top rankings on four tasks, improves average AUC, reduces imagined‑rollout error by 45% on short‑to‑medium horizons, and outperforms baselines under 12 out‑of‑distribution perturbations.

By Haoyun Tang, Haodong Cui, Keyao Xu, Zhandong Mei, Kun Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Latent Energy Action Planning with World Models

Latent Energy Action Planning (LEAP) is a new method that treats the entire action horizon as a differentiable variable and optimizes it using a frozen LeWorldModel (LeWM). LEAP couples terminal latent goal matching with a terminal‑window state energy, ensuring that the predicted terminal latent and decoder‑predicted terminal descriptor align with the goal. Using a frozen goal‑conditioned proposal, a quasi‑Newton solver, and post‑optimization projection, LEAP improves mean success from 77.5% to 94.8% across four control domains while keeping the LeWM representation frozen.

By Phu Pham, Aniket Bera