arXiv Machine Learning

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 AI
Sep 25

Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence

The paper surveys 160 benchmarks from 2017‑2026 that evaluate predictive embodied intelligence, categorising them into policy suites, embodied agents, world‑model evaluation, and prediction‑to‑action bridges. It finds that most benchmarks are model‑agnostic, rarely compare Vision‑Language‑Action policies to world models, and seldom turn predictions into executed actions. The authors argue that the lack of benchmarks designed to directly test the closed‑loop advantage of world models prevents the field from answering whether such models truly improve robotic performance.

By Gaytri Jena, Kapil Wanaskar, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Vasu Sharma, Amitava Das
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning

arXiv:2608.24885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on a...

By Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu, Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Siyuan Qian, Hao Chen, Jiajun Cao, Jian Tang, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

PAN: A World Model for General, Actionable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation

arXiv:2511.09057v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A world model is a cognitive simulator of the real-world environment allowing biological agents to reason about how the world evolves, whethe...

By PAN Team, Zihan Liu, Yi Gu, Mingkai Deng, Guangyi Liu, Zeyu Feng, Qiyue Gao, Yiyan Hu, Benhao Huang, Yichi Yang, Kun Zhou, Jiannan Xiang, Zhiting Hu, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing
arXiv AI
Aug 11

WorldSimProbe: Diagnosing Simulator Faithfulness in Action-Conditioned World Models for Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 09298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) promise to provide embodied AI with scalable predictive simulators for planning, policy evaluation, and data generation.

By Peterson Co, Sicheng Hu, Chunxuan Jiao, Hongyang Cheng, Yulin Luo, Yijie Xu, Sixiang Chen, Zhongxia Zhao, Zihao Wang, DaFeng Chi, Peidong Liu, YuTong Chen, Henghua Liu, Zhihao Yuan, Huizhu Jia, Yuzheng Zhuang, Tianle Zhang, Liang Lin, Huajie Tan, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

WorldReward: Reward Modeling for Camera-Conditioned World Models

WorldReward introduces a vision‑language model–based reward system for camera‑conditioned world models, combining action consistency and visual quality evaluation. It processes paired videos by splitting them into action‑aligned chunks, structuring visual evidence, and aggregating decisions through voting. The model is trained on a large, reasoning‑augmented preference dataset and outperforms GPT‑5.5 on a human‑annotated benchmark, improving both action execution and visual quality when applied to RL post‑training.

By Yibin Wang, Zehan Wang, Junshu Tang, Zhimin Li, Yujie Zhou, Jiazi Bu, Pengyang Ling, Feng Han, Zhixiong Zhang, Long Xing, Shengyuan Ding, Ziang Li, Cheng Jin, Yuhang Zang, Jiaqi Wang, Tianyu Pang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

PAVXploreRL introduces a reinforcement learning framework that builds on a pretrained latent world model to explicitly optimize Physical Plausibility, Action Adherence, and Visual Fidelity (PAV) objectives. By combining in‑distribution expert trajectories with noise‑driven out‑of‑distribution action exploration, the method avoids reliance on paired video supervision and improves generalization. Experiments demonstrate a 5.6% average performance gain over pretrained baselines and more reliable policy evaluation with reduced overestimation bias.

By Han Wang, Zijun Wang, Shuoshuo Xue, Rui Cao, Fengjiao Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Do Vision-Language-Action Models Mean What They Say? On the Role of Faithfulness in Embodied Reasoning

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.

By Matthew Foutter, Matteo Cercola, Lena Wild, Yunshan Wang, Michelle Li, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone