World Models (WM) are increasingly seen as a foundation for intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act beyond their training distribution. In this paper, we study WMs from a causal perspective across multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from perceptual observations to building a conceptual representation of the structure governing the environment dynamics.
arXiv:2606. 17680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents.
By Zhitong Wang, Songze Li, Hao Peng, Shuzheng Si, Yi Wang, Maosong Sun, Juanzi Li
arXiv:2607. 14180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models are widely used in offline reinforcement learning (RL) to improve sample efficiency and generate experience beyond a fixed dataset.
By Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty, Mykel Kochenderfer, Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Recent studies on world modeling for Large Language Model (LLM) agents typically formulate the learning objective as next-observation prediction. However, this objective ties supervision to what a transition happens to reveal, which may omit the dynamics most relevant to the agent's current decision.
arXiv:2608. 13456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Models (WM) are increasingly seen as a foundation for intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act beyond their training distribution.
By Avinash Kori, Fabrizio Russo
arXiv:2608. 04934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training LLM agents commonly relies on supervised fine-tuning from expert trajectories or online reinforcement learning over human-specified tasks with handcrafted verifiers.
By Xuanyu Lei, Yiqi Zhu, Chenliang Li, Kaiming Liu, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Jieping Ye, Ya-Qin Zhang, Yang Liu
Training LLM agents commonly relies on supervised fine-tuning from expert trajectories or online reinforcement learning over human-specified tasks with handcrafted verifiers. Though effective, both remain bottlenecked by externally specified tasks and supervision signals, limiting the scalability and diversity of agent training.
arXiv:2606. 14438v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them.
By Zikun Guo, Minglan Chen, Jinyou Zhai, Rongjin Zou
arXiv:2606. 24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.
By Elias Bareinboim, Junzhe Zhang, Sanghack Lee
arXiv:2606. 14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them.
By Zikun Guo
arXiv:2606. 30639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models offer a principled way to equip long-horizon LLM agents with foresight: predictions of action consequences before execution.
By Xuan Zhang, Wenxuan Zhang, See-Kiong Ng, Yang Deng
arXiv:2608. 07809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A world model is only useful for physical AI if it changes what the agent does, and only safe if it declines to do so when it is wrong.
By Yiyao Zhang, Diksha Goel, Hussain Ahmad, Shixun Huang, Jun Shen