StarWM introduces a self‑supervised attention routing mechanism that selectively applies reconstruction only to dynamically relevant regions of visual input. By combining a cross‑attention module with a dual‑stream decoder and stop‑gradient barriers, it balances faithful environmental dynamics capture with abstraction of irrelevant content. Experiments on DeepMind Control show that StarWM outperforms both reconstruction‑based and reconstruction‑free baselines, especially under distractor conditions, and preserves state attributes over long‑horizon imagination.
By Zeqiang Zhang, Fabian Wurzberger, Maximilian Otte, Daniel Schmid, Sebastian Gottwald, Arne Peter Raulf, Daniel Alexander Braun
Contrastive World Models propose a new method for learning latent dynamics without pixel reconstruction. By replacing observation reconstruction with a Deep InfoMax-like objective that maximizes mutual information between state-action sequences and local patch features of future observations, the approach encourages state representations to retain predictive information while ignoring visually irrelevant details. Experiments show that this method matches existing baselines in simple settings and significantly outperforms them when distractors or natural video backgrounds are present, while also training more efficiently by eliminating the pixel decoder.
By Bonnie Li
arXiv:2609.37165v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle under visual distribution shifts, often relying on spurious correlations tied to domain-specific f...
By Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim, ChungWoo Lee, Seoyeon Lee, Woo-Jeong Baek, Adam Zhou, Chip Huyen, Jun-Ki Lee, Gi-Cheon Kang, Byoung-Tak Zhang
JEPA-Bisim introduces a bisimulation encoder to joint-embedding predictive world models, ensuring that states with similar transition dynamics are mapped to nearby latent representations while suppressing irrelevant slow features such as background changes and distractors. The approach improves robustness on navigation (PointMaze) and manipulation (PushT) tasks under varied test-time visual conditions, achieving up to tenfold smaller latent spaces than DINO-WM. It remains effective across different pre-trained visual encoders, including DINOv2, SimDINOv2, and iBOT.
By Leonardo F. Toso, Davit Shadunts, Yunyang Lu, Gloria Geng, Nihal Sharma, Donglin Zhan, Nam H. Nguyen, James Anderson
arXiv:2606. 12217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions.
By Lu Qiu, Yizhuo Li, Yi Chen, Yuying Ge, Yixiao Ge, Xihui Liu
arXiv:2607. 04409v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning and planning in imagination using world models provides an effective paradigm for training agents for decision-making.
By Fan Feng, Yujia Zheng, Minghao Fu, Yongqiang Chen, Guangyi Chen, Kevin Murphy, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhang