Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models introduces RP1, a neural planner that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. Unlike existing planners that are hand‑designed or only inform policies, RP1 fully learns to refine plans and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using 1,000× fewer roll‑outs and up to 67× faster inference.
The paper investigates Joint-Embedding Predictive World Models (JEPA-WMs), a class of methods that perform planning in a learned representation space rather than raw input space. It systematically studies how model architecture, training objectives, and planning algorithms influence success across simulated and real‑world robotic tasks, and proposes a JEPA-WM variant that surpasses established baselines in navigation and manipulation. The authors provide code, data, and checkpoints for reproducibility.
By Basile Terver, Tsung-Yen Yang, Jean Ponce, Adrien Bardes, Yann LeCun
arXiv:2604. 03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning.
By Wancong Zhang, Basile Terver, Artem Zholus, Soham Chitnis, Harsh Sutaria, Mido Assran, Randall Balestriero, Amir Bar, Adrien Bardes, Yann LeCun, Nicolas Ballas
arXiv:2605. 08732v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern vision-based world models can represent observations as compact yet expressive latent manifolds, but fast goal-oriented planning in these spaces remains challenging.
By Hoang Nguyen, Xiaohao Xu, Xiaonan Huang
arXiv:2606. 07974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A learned world model provides a powerful physical intuition for evaluating future states.
By Yuhai Wang, Jiawei Xia, Rongxuan Zhou, Xiao Hu, Yongliang Shi, Jing Du, Yang Ye
arXiv:2606. 01626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning with a learned latent world model is a promising route to control from raw pixels, but a strong world model alone is not enough.
By Baoqi Gao, Ruize Han, Miao Wang, Song Wang
Neural world models coupled with model predictive control (MPC) replan at every environment step to bound accumulated prediction error, but this incurs substantial computational overhead. Reusing a cached plan reduces this overhead, yet its effectiveness depends on how prediction mismatch propagates through the local dynamics.
The paper introduces QWM, a framework that integrates world models with standard Q‑learning to perform test‑time search over imagined trajectories. By training the policy and value function solely on real transitions, QWM avoids compounding model bias while still benefiting from predictive search. Experiments on the Robomimic and LIBERO manipulation benchmarks show that QWM outperforms strong prior state‑of‑the‑art methods in both sample efficiency and performance.
By Perry Dong, Yueru Jia, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
arXiv:2607. 17973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models have emerged as a powerful planning paradigm by learning action-conditioned predictive dynamics and using them as internal simulators to imagine and evaluate candidate action sequences.
By Letian Cheng, Qi Zhang, Yisen Wang
arXiv:2608. 14125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LeWM is a lightweight visual world model that learns latent dynamics end-to-end from pixels and ranks candidate action sequences by the distance between their predicted endpoints and the goal.
By Xiaodi Huang, Ziyi Ding, Jingtian Wan, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Jiayu Chen, Zhang Zhang, Tao Huang
The paper introduces Imagine-then-Plan (ITP), a framework that lets agents learn by interacting with a learned world model to generate multi-step imagined trajectories. ITP features an adaptive lookahead mechanism that balances ultimate goals with task progress, producing richer signals about future outcomes. Experiments on various benchmarks show that ITP outperforms existing baselines, and analyses suggest the adaptive lookahead improves reasoning for complex tasks.
By Youwei Liu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang, Beichen Guo, Wenjie Li
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
By Jinrui Liu, Bingyan Nie, Boyu Li, Yaran Chen, Yuze Wang, Shunsen He, Haoran Li