arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Learning Commute-Time-Preserving World Models for Planning

The paper introduces Commute-Time-Preserving World Models (CTWMs), which learn latent representations that reflect commute-times in an environment by using a latent displacement predictor and a log-determinant regularizer. This approach addresses the issue that existing self-supervised methods degrade the necessary eigenvalue-dependent scaling for accurate commute-time representation. In experiments, CTWMs outperform the task-agnostic baseline LeWM on several continuous goal-reaching benchmarks while using only half the parameters.

By Michael Hauri, Peter Buttaroni, Fabian A. Mikulasch, Friedemann Zenke
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Spectral-Target Physical Latent Structuring for JEPA-Style World Models

The paper introduces a lightweight Fourier auxiliary head to enforce physically-informed structuring of latent states in JEPA-style world models, addressing a newly identified failure mode called physical representation laziness that hampers planning in dynamic environments. Experiments show that this auxiliary supervision improves planning success rates, enhances latent space correlations with key physical properties, and boosts data efficiency, even when the baseline model does not exhibit laziness.

By Penghao Zhu, Salvatore Penachio, Kaustav Mukherjee, Aneesh Jonelagadda
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving

WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.

By Mingkai Jia, Jiaxin Guo, Zhijian Shu, Jiawei Xu, Mingxiao Li, Jintao Cheng, Ping Tan, Wei Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Toward Physically Grounded JEPA World Models for Goal-Conditioned Robotic Planning

The paper presents an end‑to‑end JEPA world model that enhances latent prediction with inverse dynamics and state alignment to improve goal‑conditioned robotic planning. By preventing latent collapse and grounding representations in physical configuration, the model achieves top success rates on tasks such as TwoRoom, PushT, and OGBench‑Cube, outperforming the baseline LeWorldModel. Ablation studies confirm that state alignment consistently boosts planning success over inverse dynamics alone across all four benchmark tasks.

By Muyuan Liu (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Yue Huang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Zheng Liang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Xiang Gao (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels

arXiv:2603. 19312v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling framework for learning world models in compact latent spaces, yet existing methods remain fragile, relying on complex multi-term losses, exponential moving averages, pre-trained encoders, or auxiliary supervision to avoid representation collapse.

By Lucas Maes, Quentin Le Lidec, Damien Scieur, Yann LeCun, Randall Balestriero