arXiv:2610.15407v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An end-to-end success rate alone cannot distinguish failure to learn an action from failure to apply it as task state changes. We study this distinctio...
By Dong Nie, Rui Lan, Yixin Nie, Lingzi Hong
The paper investigates the closed‑loop behavior of a recurrent state‑space model (RSSM) trained on human demonstrations in LunarLander‑v3. Using the model for zero‑shot CEM MPC and actor‑critic training in imagination, the authors find that a model‑based A2C policy trained on a single checkpoint achieves returns comparable to the best model‑free A2C policy while requiring far fewer real transitions. They introduce the Reward Observability Fraction (ROF) to quantify how much of the reward gradient lies in the observable subspace of the latent dynamics, but show that ROF does not predict the collapse of MPC in offline settings, leaving the problem of predicting closed‑loop failure unresolved.
By Nikolai Smolyanskiy, Jonathan Shock
arXiv:2609.08618v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Benchmark scores describe what a checkpoint can do now, but they do not determine how it will respond to the next training episode. We measure this mis...
By Zhongxuan Liu, Sicheng Zhou, Hongzhi Wang
arXiv:2607. 01736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how to predict the downstream closed-loop performance of a learned latent world model from validation-time diagnostics alone.
By Nikolai Smolyanskiy
The paper challenges the common practice of selecting latent world models based on one‑step prediction loss, arguing that this metric poorly predicts planning performance. Using a frozen‑decoder protocol, the authors decompose one‑step error into encoder‑inherent and predictor‑added components and evaluate goal‑conditioned planning across three continuous‑control environments. Their experiments show that improvements in one‑step fidelity do not correlate with planning success, with correlation coefficients near zero and inconsistent exchange rates across tasks.
By Joshua Cheung, Zhang He
AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.
By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao