arXiv Computer Vision By Haojia Gao, Yue Cao, Yumin Liu, Haohua Que, Mingkai Liu, Guanqiu Guo, Zhuo Zou, Bokui Chen, Xueqian Wang

How Much Can Best-of-N Help a World Action Model? Measuring Selectable Headroom and Realizing It in Closed Loop

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The paper introduces a denoised counterfactual protocol to accurately measure the selectable headroom of world action models (WAMs) and uses these measurements to build a fail‑gated selector. Across four WAMs and two benchmarks, the study shows that the standard estimate overstates selectable headroom, that structured action perturbations can add up to 16 points of headroom, and that imagined futures retain candidate‑outcome information without loss. The selector improves closed‑loop task success from 76.9 % to 81.6 % on held‑out training episodes and from 62.6 % to 69.8 % on unseen tasks.

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