arXiv Machine Learning

The Intervention Gap in Latent World Models

The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

arXiv:2606. 04970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach.

By Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap, Nanshu Wang, Xianhui Zhu, Quintin Fettes, Gautam Tiwari, Parth Suresh, Th\'eo Moutakanni, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Allen Bolourchi, Pascale Fung, Pinar Donmez, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Seungwhan Moon
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Predicting Closed-Loop Performance of Latent World Models: Offline Checkpoint Selection for MPC and Model-Based RL Under Non-Markovian Rewards in LunarLander

We study how to predict the downstream closed-loop performance of a learned latent world model from validation-time diagnostics alone. Choosing the right checkpoint from a world-model training run is difficult: validation loss and multi-step prediction RMSE keep improving long after closed-loop performance has collapsed.

arXiv AI
1d ago

ObserverBench: Testing Mechanistic Estimates for Intervention and Control

ObserverBench is a benchmark framework that evaluates whether internal mechanistic estimators—called observers—are suitable for guiding interventions, control, or safety actions in language models. It separates estimation accuracy from the loss incurred by the chosen action, showing that accurate predictions do not always lead to better decisions. Experiments on GPT‑2‑small, Qwen2.5‑7B, Gemma‑2‑9B‑it, and Qwen3.5‑9B demonstrate that observers trained on action loss can reduce deployment loss, while traditional metrics like AUROC may rank monitors differently from actual performance.

By Vijay Erramilli
arXiv AI
Jul 21

First-Order Predictable but Pairwise Fragile: Local Task Adaptation in Trained Transformers

arXiv:2607. 16821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task arithmetic, sequential fine-tuning, activation steering, and first-order random search all operate through relatively small perturbations around an already trained checkpoint, and they rely on different local approximations: individual perturbations should be first-order predictable, task updates should compose with controlled interference, useful tangent structure should be stable and possible to estimate, and weight edits should have counterparts in representation space.

By Irina Piontkovskaia, Sergey Nikolenko
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

ForeTime-VLA: Causal Future-Token Distillation from a World Action Model for Conveyor-Belt Manipulation

ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference. whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."

By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang