How Should World Models Be Evaluated? A Decision-Making-Centric Position
arXiv:2606. 15032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI.
arXiv:2606. 15032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606.27504v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) unify future environment prediction with action generation for autonomous driving, yet existing approaches optimize only...
arXiv:2607. 04681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models.
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%.
arXiv:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
arXiv:2607. 11270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities.
arXiv:2609.38334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents for multi-step decision-making, yet transfer poorly to unseen environments. World-mode...
The paper investigates how encouraging action predictability in latent world models can preserve intrinsic dynamics, which are crucial for planning. By deriving a theoretical lower bound and conducting empirical tests, the authors show that action predictability prevents the encoder from merging distinct action outcomes, even when visual appearance varies. Using a method called Concat IDM, they achieve a substantial increase in planning success on the Push‑T benchmark, from 9.1% to 77.2%, demonstrating the practical benefit of this inductive bias.
arXiv:2606.20627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) enable agents to plan in latent space by imagining the outcomes of candidate actions, yet task spe...
arXiv:2603.26741v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Goal-conditioned visual navigation has been a long-standing testbed for embodied AI. We study a natural language-conditioned variant, languag...