arXiv AI

On the Divergence of Accuracy and Mechanism Consistency in Time Series World Models

The paper introduces a formal framework and benchmark for time‑series world models (TSWMs) that separates state, actions, and exogenous inputs, and defines a new metric called mechanism consistency to evaluate whether model predictions move in the expected direction when actions change. Experiments on eight public datasets show that using a frozen latent prediction space and gated output fusion improves prediction accuracy, while prediction error and mechanism consistency often diverge, with the best‑performing models sometimes failing to exhibit consistent directional responses. Adding a directional supervision loss significantly boosts mechanism consistency without affecting mean‑absolute error, providing a practical recipe for building more reliable TSWMs.

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 Machine Learning
Jul 30

CalTwin: Towards Calibrated, Shift-Robust Medical World Models via Fisher-Information Regularisation

arXiv:2607. 26752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical world models aim to learn a latent state of patient or organ physiology and a transition function that forecasts how that state evolves under interventions, supporting downstream tasks from imaging-based diagnosis to digital-twin treatment planning.

By Behraj Khan, Shabir Ahmad, Syed Ahmad Chan Bukhari, Tahir Qasim Syed
arXiv AI
Sep 15

When Should a World Model Move? Loss-Conditioned State Execution

The paper introduces loss‑conditioned state execution, a model‑agnostic technique that decides whether to apply a world model’s proposed state change or keep the current state based on whether the change reduces downstream loss. It formalizes state movability as the existence of a loss‑reducing feasible correction and constructs loss‑specific proposals from predictive distributions, executing them only when a groupwise lower confidence bound on loss improvement is positive. Experiments on forecasting and dynamics benchmarks show that the method accepts updates for a subset of cases, achieving lower bounded loss than persistence or always executing the proposal, and highlights that event predictability and loss‑based decisions must be evaluated separately.

By Jintao Xu, Zhengyu Chen, Ben Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Jianshen Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Beyond Model Ranking: Regime Diagnosis for Distributional-Statistical Misspecification in Industrial Time-Series Forecasting

The paper introduces a regime‑diagnosis framework for industrial time‑series forecasting, highlighting that canonical loss functions embed fixed statistical priors that are violated in real‑world demand regimes such as zero‑inflation, skewness, and high variability. It proposes the Regime‑wise Relative Bias Vector (RBV) as a metric‑agnostic diagnostic that decomposes bias into an intrinsic floor and an excess attributable to training. A large‑scale study across 13 loss objectives and 60,000+ series demonstrates that regime‑aware diagnosis distinguishes optimization‑from‑bias failures and that regime‑aware training can eliminate pooling‑induced bias that mere capacity scaling cannot.

By Pengyu Nie, Chenglang Xu, Yaoshi Chen, Chaogan Ren, Wei Hu, Chao Yang, Jiangong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

CEDAR: Controlled and Event-Driven Demand Forecasting via Residual Decomposition

CEDAR is a two‑stage framework for demand forecasting that incorporates planned actions and external event signals. Stage I uses an Action‑Interleaved Transformer to model controllable state transitions under interventions, while Stage II applies a Residual Correction Module that aligns event descriptions with product context using LLM‑assisted text representations. Experiments on a large Alibaba 1688 dataset show that CEDAR improves simulation accuracy over traditional time‑series forecasting baselines and benefits real‑world budget planning.

By Junjie Meng, Ranxu Zhang, Zi-an Zhang, Shujun Liu, Xiaoning Qi, Xiaozhou Xu, Yanyong Zhang, Hui Xiong, Chao Wang
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
Jul 21

Differentiable latent structure discovery for interpretable forecasting in clinical time series

arXiv:2604. 27967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: We introduce StructGP, a continuous-time multi-task Gaussian process that couples process convolutions with differentiable structure learning to uncover a sparse, ordered directed acyclic graph (DAG) of inter-variable dependencies while preserving principled uncertainty.

By Ivan Lerner, Jean Feydy, Alexandre Kalimouttou, Anita Burgun, Francis Bach
arXiv AI
Aug 21

Drift-Adaptive ICU Intervention Prediction: Freezing the Physiological Encoder for Auditable Model Updating

arXiv:2607. 19020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clinical decision support degrades as treatment protocols evolve, but the obstacle to updating a deployed model is governance as much as accuracy: once retraining touches every parameter, no one can say afterwards where the update acted.

By Fatema Ferdous Tamanna, K. M. Merajul Arefin, Md. Abdul Masud