Daily Papers

World models enable agents to anticipate the effects of their actions by internalizing environment dynamics. In enterprise systems, however, these dynamics are often defined by tenant-specific business logic that varies across deployments and evolves over time, making models trained on historical transitions brittle under deployment shift. We ask a question the world-models literature has not addressed: when the rules can be read at inference time, does an agent still need to learn them? We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that in settings where transition dynamics are configurable and readable, runtime discovery complements offline training by grounding predictions in the active system instance. We propose enterprise discovery agents, which recover relevant transition dynamics at runtime by reading the system's configuration rather than relying solely on internalized representations. We introduce CascadeBench, a reasoning-focused benchmark for enterprise cascade prediction that adopts the evaluation methodology of World of Workflows on diverse synthetic environments, and use it together with deployment-shift evaluation to show that offline-trained world models can perform well in-distribution but degrade as dynamics change, whereas discovery-based agents are more robust under shift by grounding their predictions in the current instance. Our findings suggest that, in configurable enterprise environments, agents should not rely solely on fixed internalized dynamics, but should incorporate mechanisms for discovering relevant transition logic at runtime.

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to unlock capabilities beyond imitation learning for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, but its requirement for massive real-world interaction prevents direct deployment on physical robots. Recent work attempts to use learned world models as simulators for policy optimization, yet closed-loop imagined rollouts inevitably suffer from hallucination and long-horizon error accumulation. Such errors do not merely degrade visual fidelity; they corrupt the optimization signal, encouraging policies to exploit model inaccuracies rather than genuine task progress. We propose WoVR, a reliable world-model-based reinforcement learning framework for post-training VLA policies. Instead of assuming a faithful world model, WoVR explicitly regulates how RL interacts with imperfect imagined dynamics. It improves rollout stability through a controllable action-conditioned video world model, reshapes imagined interaction to reduce effective error depth via Keyframe-Initialized Rollouts, and maintains policy-simulator alignment through World Model-Policy co-evolution. Extensive experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that WoVR enables stable long-horizon imagined rollouts and effective policy optimization, improving average LIBERO success from 39.95% to 69.2% (+29.3 points) and real-robot success from 61.7% to 91.7% (+30.0 points). These results show that learned world models can serve as practical simulators for reinforcement learning when hallucination is explicitly controlled.

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional visual quality in video generation, making them promising for autonomous driving world modeling. However, existing video diffusion-based world models struggle with flexible-length, long-horizon predictions and integrating trajectory planning. This is because conventional video diffusion models rely on global joint distribution modeling of fixed-length frame sequences rather than sequentially constructing localized distributions at each timestep. In this work, we propose Epona, an autoregressive diffusion world model that enables localized spatiotemporal distribution modeling through two key innovations: 1) Decoupled spatiotemporal factorization that separates temporal dynamics modeling from fine-grained future world generation, and 2) Modular trajectory and video prediction that seamlessly integrate motion planning with visual modeling in an end-to-end framework. Our architecture enables high-resolution, long-duration generation while introducing a novel chain-of-forward training strategy to address error accumulation in autoregressive loops. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 7.4\% FVD improvement and minutes longer prediction duration compared to prior works. The learned world model further serves as a real-time motion planner, outperforming strong end-to-end planners on NAVSIM benchmarks. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/{https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/}.

A learned world model provides a powerful physical intuition for evaluating future states. But its effectiveness in continuous control also depends critically on how candidate actions are generated for model-based planning. Rather than solely asking how accurately a model can simulate the future, we ask: which candidate actions are worth evaluating in the first place? Existing planners typically search arbitrarily or use expert demonstrations only to initialize a sampling mean, discarding the expert's state-conditioned confidence. Properly guiding this search requires a robust action prior, yet current approaches often rely on independent visual encoders or large-scale VLMs to obtain one. We argue that this architectural bloat is unnecessary: the exact same data - and the learned representations of the world model itself - inherently encode the agent's action intuition. We introduce PRISM, a task-agnostic framework that extracts both from a single dataset while maintaining strict architectural simplicity. Building on a standard JEPA-style latent world model, PRISM attaches a lightweight MLP directly to its frozen encoder to predict a state-conditioned Gaussian prior. At plan time, PRISM fuses this prior into the planner's sampling distribution via a precision-weighted Product-of-Gaussians update. This parameter-free, closed-form integration steers the sampling process, making the prior confident where it is and ceding control where it is not. PRISM improves success rates by 35 percentage points over vanilla world-model-based MPC on Cube and 32 percentage points on PushT, without introducing significant inference overhead.

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively supported at scale through the use of world models. However, in practice, scaling such approaches remains fundamentally limited. A commonly recognized challenge is model bias and error compounding, which degrade long-horizon predictions. Beyond these issues, we identify a more critical yet underexplored bottleneck: a structural misalignment between search and value learning in existing world model approaches. In particular, policy improvement often relies on value functions induced by a separate, non-search policy, resulting in training inconsistency and ultimately suboptimal learning. To address this limitation, we propose Model-Based Diffusion Policy Optimization (MBDPO) in world models, a framework that unifies search and policy optimization through diffusion policy representations, thereby unlocking the potential of world models for scalable policy learning. Instead of constructing an explicit planner over a learned world model, we reformulate policy optimization as a diffusion process over searched trajectories in latent world models. In this view, we extract an implicit energy function from the collected dataset that anchors the policy, enabling MBDPO to refine the score field for policy optimization while mitigating misalignment. We evaluate MBDPO across a wide range of settings, including multi-task offline pretraining, online learning, and offline-to-online fine-tuning. In the offline regime, we further investigate its scaling behavior by pretraining on large-scale datasets, observing consistent and monotonic performance gains with increasing model capacity.

Learning how the world works is central to building AI agents that can adapt to complex environments. Traditional world models based on deep learning demand vast amounts of training data, and do not flexibly update their knowledge from sparse observations. Recent advances in program synthesis using Large Language Models (LLMs) give an alternate approach which learns world models represented as source code, supporting strong generalization from little data. To date, application of program-structured world models remains limited to natural language and grid-world domains. We introduce a novel program synthesis method for effectively modeling complex, non-gridworld domains by representing a world model as an exponentially-weighted product of programmatic experts (PoE-World) synthesized by LLMs. We show that this approach can learn complex, stochastic world models from just a few observations. We evaluate the learned world models by embedding them in a model-based planning agent, demonstrating efficient performance and generalization to unseen levels on Atari's Pong and Montezuma's Revenge. We release our code and display the learned world models and videos of the agent's gameplay at https://topwasu.github.io/poe-world.

To solve tasks in complex environments, robots need to learn from experience. Deep reinforcement learning is a common approach to robot learning but requires a large amount of trial and error to learn, limiting its deployment in the physical world. As a consequence, many advances in robot learning rely on simulators. On the other hand, learning inside of simulators fails to capture the complexity of the real world, is prone to simulator inaccuracies, and the resulting behaviors do not adapt to changes in the world. The Dreamer algorithm has recently shown great promise for learning from small amounts of interaction by planning within a learned world model, outperforming pure reinforcement learning in video games. Learning a world model to predict the outcomes of potential actions enables planning in imagination, reducing the amount of trial and error needed in the real environment. However, it is unknown whether Dreamer can facilitate faster learning on physical robots. In this paper, we apply Dreamer to 4 robots to learn online and directly in the real world, without simulators. Dreamer trains a quadruped robot to roll off its back, stand up, and walk from scratch and without resets in only 1 hour. We then push the robot and find that Dreamer adapts within 10 minutes to withstand perturbations or quickly roll over and stand back up. On two different robotic arms, Dreamer learns to pick and place multiple objects directly from camera images and sparse rewards, approaching human performance. On a wheeled robot, Dreamer learns to navigate to a goal position purely from camera images, automatically resolving ambiguity about the robot orientation. Using the same hyperparameters across all experiments, we find that Dreamer is capable of online learning in the real world, establishing a strong baseline. We release our infrastructure for future applications of world models to robot learning.

The integration of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with World Models has gained increasing attention. One representative approach treats learned World Models as generative simulators, enabling policy optimization entirely within "imagination." However, when deployed as simulators for specific environments such as the LIBERO benchmark, existing World Models often suffer from poor generalization and long-horizon error accumulation. During closed-loop rollouts, these models are highly sensitive to initial-state perturbations; minor changes in color, illumination, and other visual factors can trigger cascading hallucinations, leading to severe blurriness or overexposure. Moreover, long-horizon error accumulation further degrades the quality and fidelity of predicted future states. These issues limit the reliability of World Models as simulators. To mitigate these problems, we propose Sword, a robust World Model framework. Our method introduces Structure-Guided Style Augmentation to disentangle the visual textures of interactive environments from task-relevant dynamics, thereby improving generalization. We further propose Dynamic Latent Bootstrapping, which maintains consistency between training and inference while keeping memory consumption low. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline WoVR in terms of generalization, generation quality, robustness, fidelity, and the success rate of reinforcement-learning post-training for VLA models.

Model predictive control (MPC) with learned world models has emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control, particularly for its ability to generalize zero-shot when deployed in new environments. However, learned world models often struggle with long-horizon control due to the accumulation of prediction errors and the exponentially growing search space. In this work, we address these challenges by learning latent world models at multiple temporal scales and performing hierarchical planning across these scales, enabling long-horizon reasoning while substantially reducing inference-time planning complexity. Our approach serves as a modular planning abstraction that applies across diverse latent world-model architectures and domains. We demonstrate that this hierarchical approach enables zero-shot control on real-world non-greedy robotic tasks, achieving a 70% success rate on pick-&-place using only a final goal specification, compared to 0% for a single-level world model. In addition, across physics-based simulated environments including push manipulation and maze navigation, hierarchical planning achieves higher success while requiring up to 4x less planning-time compute.

End-to-end autonomous driving models based on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures have shown promising results by learning driving policies through behavior cloning on expert demonstrations. However, imitation learning inherently limits the model to replicating observed behaviors without exploring diverse driving strategies, leaving it brittle in novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a natural remedy by enabling policy exploration beyond the expert distribution. Yet VLA models, typically trained on offline datasets, lack directly observable state transitions, necessitating a learned world model to anticipate action consequences. In this work, we propose a unified understanding-and-generation framework that leverages world modeling to simultaneously enable meaningful exploration and provide dense supervision. Specifically, we augment trajectory prediction with future RGB and depth image generation as dense world modeling objectives, requiring the model to learn fine-grained visual and geometric representations that substantially enrich the planning backbone. Beyond serving as a supervisory signal, the world model further acts as a source of intrinsic reward for policy exploration: its image prediction uncertainty naturally measures a trajectory's novelty relative to the training distribution, where high uncertainty indicates out-of-distribution scenarios that, if safe, represent valuable learning opportunities. We incorporate this exploration signal into a safety-gated reward and optimize the policy via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on the NAVSIM and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a state-of-the-art PDMS score of 93.7 and an EPDMS of 88.8 on NAVSIM. The code and demo will be publicly available at https://zihaosheng.github.io/ExploreVLA/.

Despite impressive progress in video generation, existing models remain limited to surface-level plausibility, lacking a coherent and unified understanding of the world. Prior approaches typically incorporate only a single form of world-related knowledge or rely on rigid alignment strategies to introduce additional knowledge. However, aligning the single world knowledge is insufficient to constitute a world model that requires jointly modeling multiple heterogeneous dimensions (e.g., physical commonsense, 3D and temporal consistency). To address this limitation, we introduce DreamWorld, a unified framework that integrates complementary world knowledge into video generators via a Joint World Modeling Paradigm, jointly predicting video pixels and features from foundation models to capture temporal dynamics, spatial geometry, and semantic consistency. However, naively optimizing these heterogeneous objectives can lead to visual instability and temporal flickering. To mitigate this issue, we propose Consistent Constraint Annealing (CCA) to progressively regulate world-level constraints during training, and Multi-Source Inner-Guidance to enforce learned world priors at inference. Extensive evaluations show that DreamWorld improves world consistency, outperforming Wan2.1 by 2.26 points on VBench. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ABU121111/DreamWorld{mypink{Github}}.

Most self-driving systems rely on hand-coded perception outputs and engineered driving rules. Learning directly from human driving data with an end-to-end method can allow for a training architecture that is simpler and scales well with compute and data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end training architecture that uses real driving data to train a driving policy in an on-policy simulator. We show two different methods of simulation, one with reprojective simulation and one with a learned world model. We show that both methods can be used to train a policy that learns driving behavior without any hand-coded driving rules. We evaluate the performance of these policies in a closed-loop simulation and when deployed in a real-world advanced driver-assistance system.

We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.

The enduring challenge in the field of artificial intelligence has been the control of systems to achieve desired behaviours. While for systems governed by straightforward dynamics equations, methods like Linear Quadratic Regulation (LQR) have historically proven highly effective, most real-world tasks, which require a general problem-solver, demand world models with dynamics that cannot be easily described by simple equations. Consequently, these models must be learned from data using neural networks. Most model predictive control (MPC) algorithms designed for visual world models have traditionally explored gradient-free population-based optimisation methods, such as Cross Entropy and Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) for planning. However, we present an exploration of a gradient-based alternative that fully leverages the differentiability of the world model. In our study, we conduct a comparative analysis between our method and other MPC-based alternatives, as well as policy-based algorithms. In a sample-efficient setting, our method achieves on par or superior performance compared to the alternative approaches in most tasks. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid model that combines policy networks and gradient-based MPC, which outperforms pure policy based methods thereby holding promise for Gradient-based planning with world models in complex real-world tasks.

Neural world models coupled with model predictive control (MPC) replan at every environment step to bound accumulated prediction error, but this incurs substantial computational overhead. Reusing a cached plan reduces this overhead, yet its effectiveness depends on how prediction mismatch propagates through the local dynamics. We analyze this trade-off with a perturbation-based dynamic-regret framework and show that stale-plan penalties scale with the reuse tolerance, the accumulated mismatch since the last replanning step, and the local dynamics sensitivity. Based on this structure, we propose AdaReP, a training-free wrapper that adapts the replanning tolerance online using the current deviation from the cached rollout and a local sensitivity estimate, without modifying the learned world model or planner. Across image-space planning, latent-space control, and real-world robotic manipulation, AdaReP substantially reduces planner-side computation while maintaining comparable task performance, including over 80% fewer queries on a 50-trial physical robot study.

Recent advances in world models have shown promise for modeling future dynamics of environmental states, enabling agents to reason and act without accessing real environments. Current methods mainly perform single-step or fixed-horizon rollouts, leaving their potential for complex task planning under-exploited. We propose Imagine-then-Plan (ITP), a unified framework for agent learning via lookahead imagination, where an agent's policy model interacts with the learned world model, yielding multi-step ``imagined'' trajectories. Since the imagination horizon may vary by tasks and stages, we introduce a novel adaptive lookahead mechanism by trading off the ultimate goal and task progress. The resulting imagined trajectories provide rich signals about future consequences, such as achieved progress and potential conflicts, which are fused with current observations, formulating a partially observable and imaginable Markov decision process to guide policy learning. We instantiate ITP with both training-free and reinforcement-trained variants. Extensive experiments across representative agent benchmarks demonstrate that ITP significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Further analyses validate that our adaptive lookahead largely enhances agents' reasoning capability, providing valuable insights into addressing broader, complex tasks.

Robust coordination is critical for effective decision-making in multi-agent systems, especially under partial observability. A central question in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is whether to engineer communication protocols or learn them end-to-end. We investigate this dichotomy using embodied world models. We propose and compare two communication strategies for a cooperative task-allocation problem. The first, Learned Direct Communication (LDC), learns a protocol end-to-end, with agents generating messages and actions concurrently. The second, Intention Communication, uses an engineered inductive bias: a compact, learned world model, the Imagined Trajectory Generation Module (ITGM), to simulate future states. Agents then communicate a summary of this plan. We evaluate these approaches on goal-directed interaction in a grid world, a canonical abstraction for embodied AI problems. Our experiments reveal that while emergent communication is viable in simple settings, the engineered, world model-based approach shows superior performance, sample efficiency, and scalability as complexity increases. These findings advocate for integrating structured, predictive models into MARL agents to enable active, goal-driven coordination.

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient steps for every new sample. While such high update-to-data (UTD) ratios have shown strong empirical performance, they also introduce instability to the training process. Previous approaches need to rely on periodic neural network parameter resets to address this instability, but restarting the training process is infeasible in many real-world applications and requires tuning the resetting interval. In this paper, we focus on one of the core difficulties of stable training with limited samples: the inability of learned value functions to generalize to unobserved on-policy actions. We mitigate this issue directly by augmenting the off-policy RL training process with a small amount of data generated from a learned world model. Our method, Model-Augmented Data for TD Learning (MAD-TD), uses small amounts of generated data to stabilize high UTD training and achieve competitive performance on the most challenging tasks in the DeepMind control suite. Our experiments further highlight the importance of employing a good model to generate data, MAD-TD's ability to combat value overestimation, and its practical stability gains for continued learning.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can solve challenging control problems directly from image observations, but they often require millions of environment interactions to do so. Recently, model-based RL algorithms have greatly improved sample-efficiency by concurrently learning an internal model of the world, and supplementing real environment interactions with imagined rollouts for policy improvement. However, learning an effective model of the world from scratch is challenging, and in stark contrast to humans that rely heavily on world understanding and visual cues for learning new skills. In this work, we investigate whether internal models learned by modern model-based RL algorithms can be leveraged to solve new, distinctly different tasks faster. We propose Model-Based Cross-Task Transfer (XTRA), a framework for sample-efficient online RL with scalable pretraining and finetuning of learned world models. By offline multi-task pretraining and online cross-task finetuning, we achieve substantial improvements over a baseline trained from scratch; we improve mean performance of model-based algorithm EfficientZero by 23%, and by as much as 71% in some instances.

Learned world models summarize an agent's experience to facilitate learning complex behaviors. While learning world models from high-dimensional sensory inputs is becoming feasible through deep learning, there are many potential ways for deriving behaviors from them. We present Dreamer, a reinforcement learning agent that solves long-horizon tasks from images purely by latent imagination. We efficiently learn behaviors by propagating analytic gradients of learned state values back through trajectories imagined in the compact state space of a learned world model. On 20 challenging visual control tasks, Dreamer exceeds existing approaches in data-efficiency, computation time, and final performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies excel in aligning language, perception, and robot control. However, most VLAs are trained purely by imitation, which overfits to demonstrations, and is brittle under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) directly optimizes task reward and thus addresses this misalignment, but real-robot interaction is expensive and conventional simulators are hard to engineer and transfer. We address both data efficiency and optimization stability in VLA post-training via a learned world model and an RL procedure tailored to flow-based action heads. Specifically, we introduce Prophet, a unified action-to-video robot actuation pretrained across large-scale, heterogeneous robot data to learn reusable action-outcome dynamics. It is able to few-shot adapt to new robots, objects, and environments, yielding a rollout-ready simulator. Upon Prophet, we reinforce action policies with Flow-action-GRPO (FA-GRPO), which adapts Flow-GRPO to operate on VLA actions, and with FlowScale, a stepwise reweighting that rescales per-step gradients in the flow head. Together, Prophet, FA-GRPO, and FlowScale constitute ProphRL, a practical, data- and compute-efficient path to VLA post-training. Experiments show 5-17% success gains on public benchmarks and 24-30% gains on real robots across different VLA variants.

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used Gaussian parameterization. To achieve this, we propose a principled framework that models the continuous RL policy as a generative model of optimal trajectories. By conditioning the policy on a latent variable, we derive a novel variational bound as the optimization objective, which promotes exploration of the environment. We then present a practical model-based RL method, called Reparameterized Policy Gradient (RPG), which leverages the multimodal policy parameterization and learned world model to achieve strong exploration capabilities and high data efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can help agents evade local optima in tasks with dense rewards and solve challenging sparse-reward environments by incorporating an object-centric intrinsic reward. Our method consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available on the project page https://haosulab.github.io/RPG/

Observational learning requires an agent to learn to perform a task by referencing only observations of the performed task. This work investigates the equivalent setting in real-world robot learning where access to hand-designed rewards and demonstrator actions are not assumed. To address this data-constrained setting, this work presents a planning-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) algorithm for world modeling from observation and interaction alone. Experiments conducted entirely in the real-world demonstrate that this paradigm is effective for learning image-based manipulation tasks from scratch in under an hour, without assuming prior knowledge, pre-training, or data of any kind beyond task observations. Moreover, this work demonstrates that the learned world model representation is capable of online transfer learning in the real-world from scratch. In comparison to existing approaches, including IRL, RL, and Behavior Cloning (BC), which have more restrictive assumptions, the proposed approach demonstrates significantly greater sample efficiency and success rates, enabling a practical path forward for online world modeling and planning from observation and interaction. Videos and more at: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/mpail2/.

Intelligent agents need to select long sequences of actions to solve complex tasks. While humans easily break down tasks into subgoals and reach them through millions of muscle commands, current artificial intelligence is limited to tasks with horizons of a few hundred decisions, despite large compute budgets. Research on hierarchical reinforcement learning aims to overcome this limitation but has proven to be challenging, current methods rely on manually specified goal spaces or subtasks, and no general solution exists. We introduce Director, a practical method for learning hierarchical behaviors directly from pixels by planning inside the latent space of a learned world model. The high-level policy maximizes task and exploration rewards by selecting latent goals and the low-level policy learns to achieve the goals. Despite operating in latent space, the decisions are interpretable because the world model can decode goals into images for visualization. Director outperforms exploration methods on tasks with sparse rewards, including 3D maze traversal with a quadruped robot from an egocentric camera and proprioception, without access to the global position or top-down view that was used by prior work. Director also learns successful behaviors across a wide range of environments, including visual control, Atari games, and DMLab levels.

Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on large-scale data offers a promising path to achieving a more generalized driving intelligence. However, VLA models are limited by a ``supervision deficit'': the vast model capacity is supervised by sparse, low-dimensional actions, leaving much of their representational power underutilized. To remedy this, we propose DriveVLA-W0, a training paradigm that employs world modeling to predict future images. This task generates a dense, self-supervised signal that compels the model to learn the underlying dynamics of the driving environment. We showcase the paradigm's versatility by instantiating it for two dominant VLA archetypes: an autoregressive world model for VLAs that use discrete visual tokens, and a diffusion world model for those operating on continuous visual features. Building on the rich representations learned from world modeling, we introduce a lightweight action expert to address the inference latency for real-time deployment. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1/v2 benchmark and a 680x larger in-house dataset demonstrate that DriveVLA-W0 significantly outperforms BEV and VLA baselines. Crucially, it amplifies the data scaling law, showing that performance gains accelerate as the training dataset size increases.

Sepsis management in the ICU requires sequential treatment decisions under rapidly evolving patient physiology. Although large language models (LLMs) encode broad clinical knowledge and can reason over guidelines, they are not inherently grounded in action-conditioned patient dynamics. We introduce SepsisAgent, a world model-augmented LLM agent for sepsis treatment recommendation. SepsisAgent uses a learned Clinical World Model to simulate patient responses under candidate fluid--vasopressor interventions, and follows a propose--simulate--refine workflow before committing to a prescription. We first show that world-model access alone yields inconsistent LLM decision performance, motivating agent-specific training. We then train SepsisAgent through a three-stage curriculum: patient-dynamics supervised fine-tuning, propose--simulate--refine behavior cloning, and world-model-based agentic reinforcement learning. On MIMIC-IV sepsis trajectories, SepsisAgent outperforms all traditional RL and LLM-based baselines in off-policy value while achieving the best safety profile under guideline adherence and unsafe-action metrics. Further analysis shows that repeated interaction with the Clinical World Model enables the agent to learn regularities in patient evolution, which remain useful even when simulator access is removed.

We study how to predict the downstream closed-loop performance of a learned latent world model from validation-time diagnostics alone. Choosing the right checkpoint from a world-model training run is difficult: validation loss and multi-step prediction RMSE keep improving long after closed-loop performance has collapsed. We present a suite of structural validation-time diagnostics drawn from optimal-control theory and apply them to Gymnasium's LunarLander v3, which features shaped rewards. We train an RSSM [5, 4] world model on it and treat per checkpoint CEM-MPC return as the oracle for closed-loop quality. By evaluating 40 metrics against this oracle, we find that the strongest single predictor is the Reward Observability Fraction (ROF), which measures the reward predictor's dependence on the observable subspace. We combine ROF with three structural regularizers into a single-number offline checkpoint selection score, the Composite Reward Observability Fraction (CROF). The CROF-selected world model trains a model-based A2C policy that beats a fairly evaluated model-free A2C baseline by ~24.5 return points while using ~65x fewer real-environment interactions, and the same world model also drives a strong zero-shot CEM-MPC policy. Code and data: https://github.com/nsmoly/LunarLander_RSSM.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving explore inference-time reasoning as a way to improve driving performance and safety in challenging scenarios. Most prior work uses natural language to express chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning before producing driving actions. However, text may not be the most efficient representation for reasoning. In this work, we present Latent-CoT-Drive (LCDrive): a model that expresses CoT in a latent language that captures possible outcomes of the driving actions being considered. Our approach unifies CoT reasoning and decision making by representing both in an action-aligned latent space. Instead of natural language, the model reasons by interleaving (1) action-proposal tokens, which use the same vocabulary as the model's output actions; and (2) world model tokens, which are grounded in a learned latent world model and express future outcomes of these actions. We cold start latent CoT by supervising the model's action proposals and world model tokens based on ground-truth future rollouts of the scene. We then post-train with closed-loop reinforcement learning to strengthen reasoning capabilities. On a large-scale end-to-end driving benchmark, LCDrive achieves faster inference, better trajectory quality, and larger improvements from interactive reinforcement learning compared to both non-reasoning and text-reasoning baselines.

This work proposes a new formulation to the long-standing problem of convex decomposition through learning feature fields, enabling the first feed-forward model for open-world convex decomposition. Our method produces high-quality decompositions of 3D shapes into a union of convex bodies, which are essential to accelerate collision detection in physical simulation, amongst many other applications. The key insight is to adopt a feature learning approach and learn a continuous feature field that can later be clustered to yield a good convex decomposition via our self-supervised, purely-geometric objective derived from the classical definition of convexity. Our formulation can be used for single shape optimization, but more importantly, feature prediction unlocks scalable, self-supervised learning on large datasets resulting in the first learned open-world model for convex decomposition. Experiments show that our decompositions are higher-quality than alternatives and generalize across open-world objects as well as across representations to meshes, CAD models, and even Gaussian splats. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/learning-convex-decomp/

Robot learning from interacting with the physical world is fundamentally bottlenecked by the cost of physical interaction. The two alternatives, supervised finetuning (SFT) from expert demonstrations and reinforcement learning (RL) in a software-based simulator, are limited by the amount of expert data available and the sim-to-real gap for manipulation. With the recent emergence of world models learned from real-world video-action data, we ask the question of whether training a policy in a world model can be more effective than supervised learning or software simulation in achieving better real-robot performance. We propose World-Gymnast, which performs RL finetuning of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy by rolling out the policy in an action-conditioned video world model and rewarding the rollouts with a vision-language model (VLM). On the Bridge robot setup, World-Gymnast outperforms SFT by as much as 18x and outperforms software simulator by as much as 2x. More importantly, World-Gymnast demonstrates intriguing capabilities of RL with a world model, including training on diverse language instructions and novel scenes from the world model, test-time training in a novel scene, and online iterative world model and policy improvement. Our results suggest learning a world model and training robot policies in the cloud could be the key to bridging the gap between robots that work in demonstrations and robots that can work in anyone's household.

Manipulation has long been a challenging task for robots, while humans can effortlessly perform complex interactions with objects, such as hanging a cup on the mug rack. A key reason is the lack of a large and uniform dataset for teaching robots manipulation skills. Current robot datasets often record robot action in different action spaces within a simple scene. This hinders the robot to learn a unified and robust action representation for different robots within diverse scenes. Observing how humans understand a manipulation task, we find that understanding how the objects should move in the 3D space is a critical clue for guiding actions. This clue is embodiment-agnostic and suitable for both humans and different robots. Motivated by this, we aim to learn a 3D flow world model from both human and robot manipulation data. This model predicts the future movement of the interacting objects in 3D space, guiding action planning for manipulation. Specifically, we synthesize a large-scale 3D optical flow dataset, named ManiFlow-110k, through a moving object auto-detect pipeline. A video diffusion-based world model then learns manipulation physics from these data, generating 3D optical flow trajectories conditioned on language instructions. With the generated 3D object optical flow, we propose a flow-guided rendering mechanism, which renders the predicted final state and leverages GPT-4o to assess whether the predicted flow aligns with the task description. This equips the robot with a closed-loop planning ability. Finally, we consider the predicted 3D optical flow as constraints for an optimization policy to determine a chunk of robot actions for manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks and reliable cross-embodiment adaptation without hardware-specific training.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.

The ability to transform a flat sheet into a complex three-dimensional structure is a fundamental test of physical intelligence. Unlike cloth manipulation, origami is governed by strict geometric axioms and hard kinematic constraints, where a single invalid crease or collision can invalidate the entire folding sequence. As a result, origami demands long-horizon constructive reasoning that jointly satisfies precise physical laws and high-level semantic intent. Existing approaches fall into two disjoint paradigms: optimization-based methods enforce physical validity but require dense, precisely specified inputs, making them unsuitable for sparse natural language descriptions, while generative foundation models excel at semantic and perceptual synthesis yet fail to produce long-horizon, physics-consistent folding processes. Consequently, generating valid origami folding sequences directly from text remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Learn2Fold, a neuro-symbolic framework that formulates origami folding as conditional program induction over a crease-pattern graph. Our key insight is to decouple semantic proposal from physical verification. A large language model generates candidate folding programs from abstract text prompts, while a learned graph-structured world model serves as a differentiable surrogate simulator that predicts physical feasibility and failure modes before execution. Integrated within a lookahead planning loop, Learn2Fold enables robust generation of physically valid folding sequences for complex and out-of-distribution patterns, demonstrating that effective spatial intelligence arises from the synergy between symbolic reasoning and grounded physical simulation.

World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm

Video generative models pre-trained on large-scale internet datasets have achieved remarkable success, excelling at producing realistic synthetic videos. However, they often generate clips based on static prompts (e.g., text or images), limiting their ability to model interactive and dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we propose Dynamic World Simulation (DWS), a novel approach to transform pre-trained video generative models into controllable world simulators capable of executing specified action trajectories. To achieve precise alignment between conditioned actions and generated visual changes, we introduce a lightweight, universal action-conditioned module that seamlessly integrates into any existing model. Instead of focusing on complex visual details, we demonstrate that consistent dynamic transition modeling is the key to building powerful world simulators. Building upon this insight, we further introduce a motion-reinforced loss that enhances action controllability by compelling the model to capture dynamic changes more effectively. Experiments demonstrate that DWS can be versatilely applied to both diffusion and autoregressive transformer models, achieving significant improvements in generating action-controllable, dynamically consistent videos across games and robotics domains. Moreover, to facilitate the applications of the learned world simulator in downstream tasks such as model-based reinforcement learning, we propose prioritized imagination to improve sample efficiency, demonstrating competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Acquiring an accurate world model online for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is challenging due to data nonstationarity, which typically causes catastrophic forgetting for neural networks (NNs). From the online learning perspective, a Follow-The-Leader (FTL) world model is desirable, which optimally fits all previous experiences at each round. Unfortunately, NN-based models need re-training on all accumulated data at every interaction step to achieve FTL, which is computationally expensive for lifelong agents. In this paper, we revisit models that can achieve FTL with incremental updates. Specifically, our world model is a linear regression model supported by nonlinear random features. The linear part ensures efficient FTL update while the nonlinear random feature empowers the fitting of complex environments. To best trade off model capacity and computation efficiency, we introduce a locality sensitive sparse encoding, which allows us to conduct efficient sparse updates even with very high dimensional nonlinear features. We validate the representation power of our encoding and verify that it allows efficient online learning under data covariate shift. We also show, in the Dyna MBRL setting, that our world models learned online using a single pass of trajectory data either surpass or match the performance of deep world models trained with replay and other continual learning methods.

The integration of machine learning tools into telecom networks, has led to two prevailing paradigms, namely, language-based systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), and physics-based systems, such as Digital Twins (DTs). While LLM-based approaches enable flexible interaction and automation, they lack explicit representations of network dynamics. DTs, in contrast, offer a high-fidelity network simulation, but remain scenario-specific and are not designed for learning or decision-making under uncertainty. This gap becomes critical for 6G systems, where decisions must take into account the evolving network states, uncertainty, and the cascading effects of control actions across multiple layers. In this article, we introduce the {Telecom World Model}~(TWM) concept, an architecture for learned, action-conditioned, uncertainty-aware modeling of telecom system dynamics. We decompose the problem into two interacting worlds, a controllable system world consisting of operator-configurable settings and an external world that captures propagation, mobility, traffic, and failures. We propose a three-layer architecture, comprising a field world model for spatial environment prediction, a control/dynamics world model for action-conditioned Key Performance Indicator (KPI) trajectory prediction, and a telecom foundation model layer for intent translation and orchestration. We showcase a comparative analysis between existing paradigms, which demonstrates that TWM jointly provides telecom state grounding, fast action-conditioned roll-outs, calibrated uncertainty, multi-timescale dynamics, model-based planning, and LLM-integrated guardrails. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept on network slicing to validate the proposed architecture, showing that the full three-layer pipeline outperforms single-world baselines and accurately predicts KPI trajectories.

Navigation is a fundamental skill of agents with visual-motor capabilities. We introduce a Navigation World Model (NWM), a controllable video generation model that predicts future visual observations based on past observations and navigation actions. To capture complex environment dynamics, NWM employs a Conditional Diffusion Transformer (CDiT), trained on a diverse collection of egocentric videos of both human and robotic agents, and scaled up to 1 billion parameters. In familiar environments, NWM can plan navigation trajectories by simulating them and evaluating whether they achieve the desired goal. Unlike supervised navigation policies with fixed behavior, NWM can dynamically incorporate constraints during planning. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in planning trajectories from scratch or by ranking trajectories sampled from an external policy. Furthermore, NWM leverages its learned visual priors to imagine trajectories in unfamiliar environments from a single input image, making it a flexible and powerful tool for next-generation navigation systems.

Agents capable of reasoning and planning in the real world require the ability of predicting the consequences of their actions. While world models possess this capability, they most often require action labels, that can be complex to obtain at scale. This motivates the learning of latent action models, that can learn an action space from videos alone. Our work addresses the problem of learning latent actions world models on in-the-wild videos, expanding the scope of existing works that focus on simple robotics simulations, video games, or manipulation data. While this allows us to capture richer actions, it also introduces challenges stemming from the video diversity, such as environmental noise, or the lack of a common embodiment across videos. To address some of the challenges, we discuss properties that actions should follow as well as relevant architectural choices and evaluations. We find that continuous, but constrained, latent actions are able to capture the complexity of actions from in-the-wild videos, something that the common vector quantization does not. We for example find that changes in the environment coming from agents, such as humans entering the room, can be transferred across videos. This highlights the capability of learning actions that are specific to in-the-wild videos. In the absence of a common embodiment across videos, we are mainly able to learn latent actions that become localized in space, relative to the camera. Nonetheless, we are able to train a controller that maps known actions to latent ones, allowing us to use latent actions as a universal interface and solve planning tasks with our world model with similar performance as action-conditioned baselines. Our analyses and experiments provide a step towards scaling latent action models to the real world.

We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.

Young children demonstrate early abilities to understand their physical world, estimating depth, motion, object coherence, interactions, and many other aspects of physical scene understanding. Children are both data-efficient and flexible cognitive systems, creating competence despite extremely limited training data, while generalizing to myriad untrained tasks -- a major challenge even for today's best AI systems. Here we introduce a novel computational hypothesis for these abilities, the Zero-shot Visual World Model (ZWM). ZWM is based on three principles: a sparse temporally-factored predictor that decouples appearance from dynamics; zero-shot estimation through approximate causal inference; and composition of inferences to build more complex abilities. We show that ZWM can be learned from the first-person experience of a single child, rapidly generating competence across multiple physical understanding benchmarks. It also broadly recapitulates behavioral signatures of child development and builds brain-like internal representations. Our work presents a blueprint for efficient and flexible learning from human-scale data, advancing both a computational account for children's early physical understanding and a path toward data-efficient AI systems.

Can large language models (LLMs) directly serve as powerful world models for model-based agents? While the gaps between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics do exist, our study reveals that the gaps can be bridged by aligning an LLM with its deployed environment and such "world alignment" can be efficiently achieved by rule learning on LLMs. Given the rich prior knowledge of LLMs, only a few additional rules suffice to align LLM predictions with the specified environment dynamics. To this end, we propose a neurosymbolic approach to learn these rules gradient-free through LLMs, by inducing, updating, and pruning rules based on comparisons of agent-explored trajectories and world model predictions. The resulting world model is composed of the LLM and the learned rules. Our embodied LLM agent "WALL-E" is built upon model-predictive control (MPC). By optimizing look-ahead actions based on the precise world model, MPC significantly improves exploration and learning efficiency. Compared to existing LLM agents, WALL-E's reasoning only requires a few principal rules rather than verbose buffered trajectories being included in the LLM input. On open-world challenges in Minecraft and ALFWorld, WALL-E achieves higher success rates than existing methods, with lower costs on replanning time and the number of tokens used for reasoning. In Minecraft, WALL-E exceeds baselines by 15-30% in success rate while costing 8-20 fewer replanning rounds and only 60-80% of tokens. In ALFWorld, its success rate surges to a new record high of 95% only after 6 iterations.

Generative video models are increasingly studied as implicit world models, yet evaluating whether they produce physically plausible 3D structure and motion remains challenging. Most existing video evaluation pipelines rely heavily on human judgment or learned graders, which can be subjective and weakly diagnostic for geometric failures. We introduce PDI-Bench (Perspective Distortion Index), a quantitative framework for auditing geometric coherence in generated videos. Given a generated clip, we obtain object-centric observations via segmentation and point tracking (e.g., SAM 2, MegaSaM, and CoTracker3), lift them to 3D world-space coordinates via monocular reconstruction, and compute a set of projective-geometry residuals capturing three failure dimensions: scale-depth alignment, 3D motion consistency, and 3D structural rigidity. To support systematic evaluation, we build PDI-Dataset, covering diverse scenarios designed to stress these geometric constraints. Across state-of-the-art video generators, PDI reveals consistent geometry-specific failure modes that are not captured by common perceptual metrics, and provides a diagnostic signal for progress toward physically grounded video generation and physical world model. Our code and dataset can be found at https://pdi-bench.github.io/.

Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/.

World models for embodied AI must be physically viable: constructed to answer intervention queries by representing the physical structure governing action outcomes, rather than merely predicting future observations. Existing observation-predictive world models can produce visually plausible but physically wrong rollouts. This failure is structural; distinct physical systems can look identical yet diverge under intervention. We expose this problem with controlled benchmarks that fix the visible scene while varying latent physics. We show that such models may recommend infeasible actions, mispredict interaction outcomes, or certify unsafe behavior. We argue that embodied AI requires world models that identify the simplest physical abstraction sufficient to answer an intervention query. Such a model comprises modular components, including environment representation, latent state and parameter estimation, action specification, interventional dynamics, and query-level response. An autonomous orchestrator should identify the relevant abstraction and compose compatible learned and structured components per query. When closed-form physics is unavailable, uncertain, or costly, the transition model may be analytic, simulated, learned, or hybrid, but it must preserve the structure that determines interventional outcomes. This decomposition makes the model interpretable, its components verifiable, and its outputs auditable against the query. It also provides a design principle for new world models and a feasibility test for existing ones: the right abstraction is not the most detailed model of the world, but the simplest model that preserves the distinctions relevant to the query. We demonstrate this approach on queries that existing systems fail to answer correctly, and outline how an orchestrator can dynamically assemble and adapt physically viable models for planning, control, and verification.

World models have become increasingly popular in acting as learned traffic simulators. Recent work has explored replacing traditional traffic simulators with world models for policy training. In this work, we explore the robustness of existing metrics to evaluate world models as traffic simulators to see if the same metrics are suitable for evaluating a world model as a pseudo-environment for policy training. Specifically, we analyze the metametric employed by the Waymo Open Sim-Agents Challenge (WOSAC) and compare world model predictions on standard scenarios where the agents are fully or partially controlled by the world model (partial replay). Furthermore, since we are interested in evaluating the ego action-conditioned world model, we extend the standard WOSAC evaluation domain to include agents that are causal to the ego vehicle. Our evaluations reveal a significant number of scenarios where top-ranking models perform well under no perturbation but fail when the ego agent is forced to replay the original trajectory. To address these cases, we propose new metrics to highlight the sensitivity of world models to uncontrollable objects and evaluate the performance of world models as pseudo-environments for policy training and analyze some state-of-the-art world models under these new metrics.

We tackle the problem of learning complex, general behaviors directly in the real world. We propose an approach for robots to efficiently learn manipulation skills using only a handful of real-world interaction trajectories from many different settings. Inspired by the success of learning from large-scale datasets in the fields of computer vision and natural language, our belief is that in order to efficiently learn, a robot must be able to leverage internet-scale, human video data. Humans interact with the world in many interesting ways, which can allow a robot to not only build an understanding of useful actions and affordances but also how these actions affect the world for manipulation. Our approach builds a structured, human-centric action space grounded in visual affordances learned from human videos. Further, we train a world model on human videos and fine-tune on a small amount of robot interaction data without any task supervision. We show that this approach of affordance-space world models enables different robots to learn various manipulation skills in complex settings, in under 30 minutes of interaction. Videos can be found at https://human-world-model.github.io

World models provide a powerful framework for simulating environment dynamics conditioned on actions or instructions, enabling downstream tasks such as action planning or policy learning. Recent approaches leverage world models as learned simulators, but its application to decision-time planning remains computationally prohibitive for real-time control. A key bottleneck lies in latent representations: conventional tokenizers encode each observation into hundreds of tokens, making planning both slow and resource-intensive. To address this, we propose CompACT, a discrete tokenizer that compresses each observation into as few as 8 tokens, drastically reducing computational cost while preserving essential information for planning. An action-conditioned world model that occupies CompACT tokenizer achieves competitive planning performance with orders-of-magnitude faster planning, offering a practical step toward real-world deployment of world models.

Latent world models enable efficient planning by predicting future states in a compact representation space, but their performance depends critically on the quality of the learned latent distribution. LeWorldModel (LeWM) regularizes its latents toward an isotropic Gaussian using the Epps-Pulley (EP) objective. We show that the corrective gradients of EP rapidly vanish for isolated tail samples, leaving heavy-tailed deviations insufficiently controlled. To address this limitation, we propose QQWorld, which replaces EP with a quantile-quantile matching objective that directly aligns projected latent samples with rank-matched Gaussian quantiles, thereby maintaining effective corrective gradients in the tails. We further develop cross-batch QQ, which enlarges the effective ranking pool using detached samples from previous batches, and characterize its bias-variance trade-off. Across four control environments, QQWorld effectively improves the average planning success rate of LeWM, while consistently yielding better Gaussian alignment and thinner latent tails.

Autonomous driving promises transformative improvements to transportation, but building systems capable of safely navigating the unstructured complexity of real-world scenarios remains challenging. A critical problem lies in effectively predicting the various potential outcomes that may emerge in response to the vehicle's actions as the world evolves. To address this challenge, we introduce GAIA-1 ('Generative AI for Autonomy'), a generative world model that leverages video, text, and action inputs to generate realistic driving scenarios while offering fine-grained control over ego-vehicle behavior and scene features. Our approach casts world modeling as an unsupervised sequence modeling problem by mapping the inputs to discrete tokens, and predicting the next token in the sequence. Emerging properties from our model include learning high-level structures and scene dynamics, contextual awareness, generalization, and understanding of geometry. The power of GAIA-1's learned representation that captures expectations of future events, combined with its ability to generate realistic samples, provides new possibilities for innovation in the field of autonomy, enabling enhanced and accelerated training of autonomous driving technology.

A common assumption holds that enough observational and interventional data, given to a strong enough predictor, suffices. We report a failure mode that contradicts it. Across hundreds of structural causal models, on identified quantities a strong predictor and a Bayesian baseline both succeed, but on unidentified quantities (the couplings between counterfactual worlds) the predictor collapses to a point, on 28% of models to one no valid model can produce, while the truth is an admissible interval more data never narrows. The gap is structural: prediction cannot represent uncertainty over counterfactual couplings. We cast a world model as a single positive semidefinite coupling kernel K(T,T') over admissible worlds, whose diagonal is the ordinary posterior (what a predictor recovers) and whose off-diagonal is the cross-world coupling it cannot, which every counterfactual reads. The paper is the theory of that off-diagonal. It is real: two states with identical posteriors differ on a cross-world query, and the off-diagonal is the coupling that fixes counterfactuals. It can be bounded: positive semidefiniteness is partial-identifying information the marginals lack, and enforcing it bounds counterfactuals in polynomial time where the exact response-type program is intractable. Logical structure sharpens it: ontology axioms tighten the bound by up to a third, propagating to couplings they never touch. It can be acquired: targeted scars, constraints learned from encountered infeasibilities, close the gap several times faster than untargeted ones. Its full reconstruction is approximate counting of the admissible worlds, tractable below the Sly-Sun threshold and inapproximable above; we do not claim to beat the worst case.

Large-scale generative models have achieved remarkable success in a number of domains. However, for sequential decision-making problems, such as robotics, action-labelled data is often scarce and therefore scaling-up foundation models for decision-making remains a challenge. A potential solution lies in leveraging widely-available unlabelled videos to train world models that simulate the consequences of actions. If the world model is accurate, it can be used to optimize decision-making in downstream tasks. Image-to-video diffusion models are already capable of generating highly realistic synthetic videos. However, these models are not action-conditioned, and the most powerful models are closed-source which means they cannot be finetuned. In this work, we propose to adapt pretrained video diffusion models to action-conditioned world models, without access to the parameters of the pretrained model. Our approach, AVID, trains an adapter on a small domain-specific dataset of action-labelled videos. AVID uses a learned mask to modify the intermediate outputs of the pretrained model and generate accurate action-conditioned videos. We evaluate AVID on video game and real-world robotics data, and show that it outperforms existing baselines for diffusion model adaptation.1 Our results demonstrate that if utilized correctly, pretrained video models have the potential to be powerful tools for embodied AI.

Evaluating recommender systems remains challenging due to the gap between offline metrics and real user behavior, as well as the scarcity of interaction data. Recent work explores large language model (LLM) agents as synthetic users, yet they typically rely on few-shot prompting, which yields a shallow understanding of the environment and limits their ability to faithfully reproduce user actions. We introduce AlignUSER, a framework that learns world-model-driven agents from human interactions. Given rollout sequences of actions and states, we formalize world modeling as a next state prediction task that helps the agent internalize the environment. To align actions with human personas, we generate counterfactual trajectories around demonstrations and prompt the LLM to compare its decisions with human choices, identify suboptimal actions, and extract lessons. The learned policy is then used to drive agent interactions with the recommender system. We evaluate AlignUSER across multiple datasets and demonstrate closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at the micro and macro levels.

Embodied world models have emerged as a promising paradigm in robotics by predicting how robot actions affect the surrounding scene. However, the rollout inference remains computationally expensive in pixel space, as long-horizon manipulation videos typically have to be generated frame by frame. This cost cannot be easily reduced by indiscriminately dropping frames, since downstream policies rely on complete preservation of sparse task-relevant events such as approach, contact, grasp, and release. To address this challenge, we propose Sparse Keyframe Interpolation Paradigm (SKIP), an event-preserving sparse-to-dense framework that avoids dense frame-by-frame generation. SKIP first identifies task-relevant keyframes by leveraging robot-aware multimodal features. It then synthesizes only these keyframes with a sparse video diffusion model. A learned gap predictor and an action-conditioned interpolator subsequently reconstruct the missing intervals according to the robot actions. On LIBERO, SKIP generates dense rollouts 4.16times faster than a dense baseline while improving visual fidelity and reducing aggregate FVD by 89.0%. Importantly, SKIP-generated videos are effective policy-training data. Even when they fully replace real demonstrations, π_{0.5} success drops only 1.3 pp in LIBERO simulation and 6.7 pp on the real robot, whereas fully dense frame-by-frame generation collapses by 48 to 58 pp.

World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.

Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions.

Energy-based predictive world models provide a powerful approach for multi-step visual planning by reasoning over latent energy landscapes rather than generating pixels. However, existing approaches face two major challenges: (i) their latent representations are typically learned in Euclidean space, neglecting the underlying geometric and hierarchical structure among states, and (ii) they struggle with long-horizon prediction, which leads to rapid degradation across extended rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GeoWorld, a geometric world model that preserves geometric structure and hierarchical relations through a Hyperbolic JEPA, which maps latent representations from Euclidean space onto hyperbolic manifolds. We further introduce Geometric Reinforcement Learning for energy-based optimization, enabling stable multi-step planning in hyperbolic latent space. Extensive experiments on CrossTask and COIN demonstrate around 3% SR improvement in 3-step planning and 2% SR improvement in 4-step planning compared to the state-of-the-art V-JEPA 2. Project website: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/GeoWorld.

We study action-conditioned world modeling as a scalable way to learn transferable dynamics priors for robot learning. By pretraining a model to predict how actions drive visual scene evolution, the resulting world model captures reusable interaction dynamics beyond appearance-level video generation. Concretely, we pretrain a multi-view interactive base diffusion world model, A2World, on large-scale robot manipulation data with real action annotations. We validate the learned dynamics priors from two complementary perspectives. First, we adapt A2World into a task- or scene-specialized real-world simulator, A2World-sim, whose long-horizon rollouts support simulator-based policy evaluation and scalable what-if analysis by replacing real-robot rollouts with world model rollouts. Second, starting from the same pretrained weights, we adapt A2World into a video-action joint prediction model, A2World-policy, that predicts actions under visual and instruction conditioning. Experiments across simulation benchmarks and real-robot settings demonstrate that action-conditioned world model pretraining yields transferable dynamics priors that benefit both simulator-centric and policy-centric robot learning.

Neural surrogates promise large speedups over classical solvers for physical dynamics but fail silently at sharp dynamical events such as shocks, fronts, and contact. We present hybrid neural world models for physical dynamics: a recipe for training and deploying multi-horizon surrogates in physical state space, where a single network with continuous horizon conditioning is trained with direct supervision against textbook reference solvers to predict any future state at horizon T in one forward pass. Although no part of the training data, loss function, or architecture supervises discontinuity location, the trained surrogate encodes it implicitly, recoverable from its forward passes alone as a per-trajectory error map that concentrates on shocks, fronts, and contacts, and stays small elsewhere. The map is competitive with or better than standard label-free baselines including deep ensembles, learned error heads, gradient-magnitude indicators, and locally-adaptive conformal prediction, while using only a single trained network and requiring no calibration set or governing-equation knowledge. The recipe supports two operating points. Mode 1 runs the surrogate alone for maximum throughput, with same-hardware CPU speedups of 26x to 72x against textbook solvers on the PDE environments. Mode 2 uses the error map to gate a reference-solver fallback, deferring uncertain trajectories and roughly halving the surrogate's residual error at the default operating point. The recipe applies without modification across reaction-diffusion, compressible Euler, and rigid-body collision dynamics.

The DreamerV3 agent recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in diverse domains, learning powerful world models in latent space using a pixel reconstruction loss. However, while the reconstruction loss is essential to Dreamer's performance, it also necessitates modeling unnecessary information. Consequently, Dreamer sometimes fails to perceive crucial elements which are necessary for task-solving when visual distractions are present in the observation, significantly limiting its potential. In this paper, we present MuDreamer, a robust reinforcement learning agent that builds upon the DreamerV3 algorithm by learning a predictive world model without the need for reconstructing input signals. Rather than relying on pixel reconstruction, hidden representations are instead learned by predicting the environment value function and previously selected actions. Similar to predictive self-supervised methods for images, we find that the use of batch normalization is crucial to prevent learning collapse. We also study the effect of KL balancing between model posterior and prior losses on convergence speed and learning stability. We evaluate MuDreamer on the commonly used DeepMind Visual Control Suite and demonstrate stronger robustness to visual distractions compared to DreamerV3 and other reconstruction-free approaches, replacing the environment background with task-irrelevant real-world videos. Our method also achieves comparable performance on the Atari100k benchmark while benefiting from faster training.

How do sequence models represent their decision-making process? Prior work suggests that Othello-playing neural network learned nonlinear models of the board state (Li et al., 2023). In this work, we provide evidence of a closely related linear representation of the board. In particular, we show that probing for "my colour" vs. "opponent's colour" may be a simple yet powerful way to interpret the model's internal state. This precise understanding of the internal representations allows us to control the model's behaviour with simple vector arithmetic. Linear representations enable significant interpretability progress, which we demonstrate with further exploration of how the world model is computed.

While non-prehensile manipulation (e.g., controlled pushing/poking) constitutes a foundational robotic skill, its learning remains challenging due to the high sensitivity to complex physical interactions involving friction and restitution. To achieve robust policy learning and generalization, we opt to learn a world model of the 3D rigid body dynamics involved in non-prehensile manipulations and use it for model-based reinforcement learning. We propose PIN-WM, a Physics-INformed World Model that enables efficient end-to-end identification of a 3D rigid body dynamical system from visual observations. Adopting differentiable physics simulation, PIN-WM can be learned with only few-shot and task-agnostic physical interaction trajectories. Further, PIN-WM is learned with observational loss induced by Gaussian Splatting without needing state estimation. To bridge Sim2Real gaps, we turn the learned PIN-WM into a group of Digital Cousins via physics-aware randomizations which perturb physics and rendering parameters to generate diverse and meaningful variations of the PIN-WM. Extensive evaluations on both simulation and real-world tests demonstrate that PIN-WM, enhanced with physics-aware digital cousins, facilitates learning robust non-prehensile manipulation skills with Sim2Real transfer, surpassing the Real2Sim2Real state-of-the-arts.

Deep learning models are increasingly employed for perception, prediction, and control in complex systems. Embedding physical knowledge into these models is crucial for achieving realistic and consistent outputs, a challenge often addressed by physics-informed machine learning. However, integrating physical knowledge with representation learning becomes difficult when dealing with high-dimensional observation data, such as images, particularly under conditions of incomplete or imprecise state information. To address this, we propose Physically Interpretable World Models, a novel architecture that aligns learned latent representations with real-world physical quantities. Our method combines a variational autoencoder with a dynamical model that incorporates unknown system parameters, enabling the discovery of physically meaningful representations. By employing weak supervision with interval-based constraints, our approach eliminates the reliance on ground-truth physical annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the quality of learned representations while achieving accurate predictions of future states, advancing the field of representation learning in dynamic systems.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of interaction to learn skills. Recently, offline RL has been proposed as a framework for training RL policies on pre-existing datasets without any online interaction. However, constraining an algorithm to a fixed dataset induces a state-action distribution shift between training and inference, and limits its applicability to new tasks. In this work, we seek to get the best of both worlds: we consider the problem of pretraining a world model with offline data collected on a real robot, and then finetuning the model on online data collected by planning with the learned model. To mitigate extrapolation errors during online interaction, we propose to regularize the planner at test-time by balancing estimated returns and (epistemic) model uncertainty. We evaluate our method on a variety of visuo-motor control tasks in simulation and on a real robot, and find that our method enables few-shot finetuning to seen and unseen tasks even when offline data is limited. Videos, code, and data are available at https://yunhaifeng.com/FOWM .

World models for interactive video generation have largely focused on single-agent settings, where future observations are generated from a single control signal. However, many generated environments require multi-agent interaction: multiple players, robots, or embodied agents act simultaneously within a shared space. Scaling world models to such settings requires a principled multi-agent design: agents should remain independently controllable, permutation-symmetric, and support efficient inference while maintaining consistency across time and perspectives. In this paper, we present our generative multi-agent world model for interactive simulation. It introduces Simplex Rotary Agent Encoding, a parameter-free extension of 3D RoPE that represents agents as vertices of a regular simplex in rotary angle space. This gives each agent a distinct phase while making all agents permutation-equivalent, enabling scalable agent identity without learned per-slot identities or a fixed agent ordering. To avoid dense all-to-all attention across agents, we further propose Sparse Hub Attention, where learnable hub tokens mediate token interaction across agents, reducing cross-agent attention cost from quadratic to linear in the number of agents. For real-time rollout, we distill a full-context diffusion teacher into a causal student that generates temporal blocks sequentially with KV caching, enabling action-responsive generation at 24 FPS. Experiments in multiplayer virtual environments show that our model improves video fidelity, action controllability, and inter-agent consistency over slot-based and dense-attention baselines, while generalizing from two to four players without additional training.

Current game world models simulate environments from a subjective, player-centric perspective. However, by treating the Non-Player Character (NPC) merely as background pixels, these models cannot capture interactions between the player and NPC. In that sense, they act as passive video renderers rather than real simulation engines, lacking the physical understanding needed to model action-induced NPC reactivities. We introduce ReactiveGWM, a reactive game world model that synthesizes dynamic interactions between the player and NPC. Instead of entangling all interaction dynamics, ReactiveGWM explicitly decouples player controls from NPC behaviors. Player actions are injected into the diffusion backbone via a lightweight additive bias, while high-level NPC responses (e.g., Offense, Control, Defense) are grounded through cross-attention modules. Crucially, these modules learn a game-agnostic representation of interactive logic. This enables zero-shot strategy transfer: our learned modules can be plugged directly into off-the-shelf, unannotated world models of different games. This instantly unlocks steerable NPC interactions without any domain-specific retraining. Evaluated on two Street Fighter games, ReactiveGWM maintains fine-grain player controllability while achieving robust, prompt-aligned NPC strategy adherence, paving the way for scalable, strategy-rich interaction with the NPC.

Scaling action-controllable world models is limited by the scarcity of action labels. While latent action learning promises to extract control interfaces from unlabeled video, learned latents often fail to transfer across contexts: they entangle scene-specific cues and lack a shared coordinate system. This occurs because standard objectives operate only within each clip, providing no mechanism to align action semantics across contexts. Our key insight is that although actions are unobserved, their semantic effects are observable and can serve as a shared reference. We introduce SeqΔ-REPA, a sequence-level control-effect alignment objective that anchors integrated latent action to temporal feature differences from a frozen, self-supervised video encoder. Building on this, we present Olaf-World, a pipeline that pretrains action-conditioned video world models from large-scale passive video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method learns a more structured latent action space, leading to stronger zero-shot action transfer and more data-efficient adaptation to new control interfaces than state-of-the-art baselines.

The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, have proven challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific solutions with online policy learning. We argue that the true potential of world models lies in their ability to reason and plan across diverse problems using only passive data. Concretely, we require world models to have the following three properties: 1) be trainable on offline, pre-collected trajectories, 2) support test-time behavior optimization, and 3) facilitate task-agnostic reasoning. To realize this, we present DINO World Model (DINO-WM), a new method to model visual dynamics without reconstructing the visual world. DINO-WM leverages spatial patch features pre-trained with DINOv2, enabling it to learn from offline behavioral trajectories by predicting future patch features. This design allows DINO-WM to achieve observational goals through action sequence optimization, facilitating task-agnostic behavior planning by treating desired goal patch features as prediction targets. We evaluate DINO-WM across various domains, including maze navigation, tabletop pushing, and particle manipulation. Our experiments demonstrate that DINO-WM can generate zero-shot behavioral solutions at test time without relying on expert demonstrations, reward modeling, or pre-learned inverse models. Notably, DINO-WM exhibits strong generalization capabilities compared to prior state-of-the-art work, adapting to diverse task families such as arbitrarily configured mazes, push manipulation with varied object shapes, and multi-particle scenarios.

World models enable agents to predict future dynamics conditioned on actions, making the choice of latent representation central to planning and control. Such representations are often either learned directly from pixels with limited semantic structure or inherited from frozen visual foundation models with excessive task-irrelevant detail, yielding state spaces that are poorly matched to downstream planning and control. This is especially challenging in reward-free offline settings, where the model must learn from fixed trajectories without reward supervision or online interaction. To address this, we propose TC-WM, a framework for turning foundation-model embeddings into compact, task-sufficient world representations. The key design is to treat the pretrained embedding space as a semantic scaffold rather than as the final state space: TC-WM linearly projects high-dimensional visual embeddings into a compact latent as the dynamic space, aligns a subspace with the agent's physical state via contrastive learning, and reconstructs embeddings to preserve useful visual structure. This combines the generality of foundation features with the controllability of task-centric dynamics. Theoretically, we show that TC-WM suffices to identify the underlying task-centric latent factors up to a simple transformation. Empirically, TC-WM enables test-time planning across diverse environments (e.g., Robomimic and D4RL), achieving better world-modeling quality and more precise control than state-of-the-art approaches.

Human intelligence exhibits a remarkable capacity for rapid adaptation and effective problem-solving in novel and unfamiliar contexts. We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction. However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment. In this Perspective, we provide a view of world model induction drawing on decades of research in cognitive science on how humans learn and adapt so efficiently; we then call for a new evaluation framework for assessing adaptive world models in AI. Concretely, we propose a new benchmarking paradigm based on suites of carefully designed games with genuine, deep and continually refreshing novelty in the underlying game structures -- we refer to this class of games as novel games. We detail key desiderata for constructing these games and propose appropriate metrics to explicitly challenge and evaluate the agent's ability for rapid world model induction. We hope that this new evaluation framework will inspire future evaluation efforts on world models in AI and provide a crucial step towards developing AI systems capable of human-like rapid adaptation and robust generalization -- a critical component of artificial general intelligence.

The potential impacts of world models (WMs, i.e., learned simulators) on robotics are far-reaching -- policy evaluation, policy improvement, and test-time planning -- all with limited real-world interaction. To unlock these downstream capabilities, a WM needs to jointly satisfy three desiderata: (i) fidelity (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that correlate with reality), (ii) consistency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that are coherent over long horizons), and (iii) efficiency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories quickly). We propose WEAVER (World Estimation Across Views for Embodied Reasoning): a WM architecture that simultaneously achieves all three desiderata, providing state-of-the-art results on robotic manipulation tasks. WEAVER is a multi-view WM trained to predict future latents and reward values via a flow-matching loss. We distill the key design decisions across model architecture, memory, and prediction objectives required to unlock the kinds of long-horizon dynamic manipulation tasks that have confounded prior world modeling approaches. We apply WEAVER in robotic hardware, demonstrating its effectiveness at policy evaluation (ρ=0.870 correlation with real-world success rate), policy improvement (real-world success rate improvement of 38% on top of the π_{0.5} robot foundation model), and test-time planning (real-world success rate improvement of 14% with a 5-10times speedup over prior WMs). WEAVER also demonstrates better performance than prior WMs when evaluated on out-of-distribution scenarios. Code, models, and videos at: https://arnavkj1995.github.io/WEAVER/ .

Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and multiple embodiments. In downstream manipulation settings, the model produces imagined rollouts whose outcomes correlate with real-world execution for policy evaluation, improves decision making by ranking candidate futures in model-based planning, and supports inverse modeling by synthesizing robot motion from desired object motion.

A latent world model may achieve accurate short-horizon prediction while still inducing a latent space that is poorly aligned with planning. A key issue is spatiotemporal mismatch: these models are often trained with local predictive supervision, but deployed for long-horizon goal-directed search in latent spaces where Euclidean distance may not reflect what is reachable within a finite action budget. We present the Reachability-Correction auxiliary objective (RC-aux), a lightweight correction for this mismatch in reconstruction-free latent world models. RC-aux keeps the world-model backbone unchanged and adds planning-aligned supervision along two axes. Along the time axis, multi-horizon open-loop prediction trains the model beyond one-step consistency. Along the space axis, budget-conditioned reachability supervision, together with temporal hard negatives, encourages the latent space to distinguish states that are eventually reachable from those reachable within the current planning horizon. At test time, the learned reachability signal can also be used by a reachability-aware planner to favor trajectories that are both goal-directed and attainable under the available budget. We instantiate RC-aux on LeWorldModel and evaluate it under both continuation-training and matched-from-scratch settings. Across goal-conditioned pixel-control tasks and a LIBERO-Goal extension, RC-aux improves LeWM-style planning with modest additional cost. These results suggest that planning with latent world models depends not only on predictive accuracy, but also on whether the learned representation encodes the temporal and geometric structure required by downstream search. The code is available at https://github.com/Guang000/RC-aux.

Current self-supervised algorithms commonly rely on transformations such as data augmentation and masking to learn visual representations. This is achieved by enforcing invariance or equivariance with respect to these transformations after encoding two views of an image. This dominant two-view paradigm often limits the flexibility of learned representations for downstream adaptation by creating performance trade-offs between high-level invariance-demanding tasks such as image classification and more fine-grained equivariance-related tasks. In this work, we proposes seq-JEPA, a world modeling framework that introduces architectural inductive biases into joint-embedding predictive architectures to resolve this trade-off. Without relying on dual equivariance predictors or loss terms, seq-JEPA simultaneously learns two architecturally segregated representations: one equivariant to specified transformations and another invariant to them. To do so, our model processes short sequences of different views (observations) of inputs. Each encoded view is concatenated with an embedding of the relative transformation (action) that produces the next observation in the sequence. These view-action pairs are passed through a transformer encoder that outputs an aggregate representation. A predictor head then conditions this aggregate representation on the upcoming action to predict the representation of the next observation. Empirically, seq-JEPA demonstrates strong performance on both equivariant and invariant benchmarks without sacrificing one for the other. Furthermore, it excels at tasks that inherently require aggregating a sequence of observations, such as path integration across actions and predictive learning across eye movements.

As opposed to human drivers, current autonomous driving systems still require vast amounts of labeled data to train. Recently, world models have been proposed to simultaneously enhance autonomous driving capabilities by improving the way these systems understand complex real-world environments and reduce their data demands via self-supervised pre-training. In this paper, we present AD-L-JEPA (aka Autonomous Driving with LiDAR data via a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a novel self-supervised pre-training framework for autonomous driving with LiDAR data that, as opposed to existing methods, is neither generative nor contrastive. Our method learns spatial world models with a joint embedding predictive architecture. Instead of explicitly generating masked unknown regions, our self-supervised world models predict Bird's Eye View (BEV) embeddings to represent the diverse nature of autonomous driving scenes. Our approach furthermore eliminates the need to manually create positive and negative pairs, as is the case in contrastive learning. AD-L-JEPA leads to simpler implementation and enhanced learned representations. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate high-quality of embeddings learned with AD-L-JEPA. We furthermore evaluate the accuracy and label efficiency of AD-L-JEPA on popular downstream tasks such as LiDAR 3D object detection and associated transfer learning. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that AD-L-JEPA is a plausible approach for self-supervised pre-training in autonomous driving applications and is the best available approach outperforming SOTA, including most recently proposed Occupancy-MAE [1] and ALSO [2]. The source code of AD-L-JEPA is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-L-JEPA-Release.

A world model provides an agent with a representation of its environment, enabling it to predict the causal consequences of its actions. Current world models typically cannot directly and explicitly imitate the actual environment in front of a robot, often resulting in unrealistic behaviors and hallucinations that make them unsuitable for real-world robotics applications. To overcome those challenges, we propose to rethink robot world models as learnable digital twins. We introduce DreMa, a new approach for constructing digital twins automatically using learned explicit representations of the real world and its dynamics, bridging the gap between traditional digital twins and world models. DreMa replicates the observed world and its structure by integrating Gaussian Splatting and physics simulators, allowing robots to imagine novel configurations of objects and to predict the future consequences of robot actions thanks to its compositionality. We leverage this capability to generate new data for imitation learning by applying equivariant transformations to a small set of demonstrations. Our evaluations across various settings demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness by incrementing actions and object distributions, reducing the data needed to learn a policy and improving the generalization of the agents. As a highlight, we show that a real Franka Emika Panda robot, powered by DreMa's imagination, can successfully learn novel physical tasks from just a single example per task variation (one-shot policy learning). Our project page can be found in: https://dreamtomanipulate.github.io/.

It has long been hypothesised that causal reasoning plays a fundamental role in robust and general intelligence. However, it is not known if agents must learn causal models in order to generalise to new domains, or if other inductive biases are sufficient. We answer this question, showing that any agent capable of satisfying a regret bound under a large set of distributional shifts must have learned an approximate causal model of the data generating process, which converges to the true causal model for optimal agents. We discuss the implications of this result for several research areas including transfer learning and causal inference.

Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of generalizing to multi-step goal-directed tasks must have learned a predictive model of its environment. We show that this model can be extracted from the agent's policy, and that increasing the agents performance or the complexity of the goals it can achieve requires learning increasingly accurate world models. This has a number of consequences: from developing safe and general agents, to bounding agent capabilities in complex environments, and providing new algorithms for eliciting world models from agents.

Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it reduces to a tractable per-step form: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; regressing a single scalar, the critic converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions without oracle knowledge of the noise floor. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward the baseline for stochastic ones, effectively separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error and visitation-count baselines in convergence speed and final world model accuracy.

Video world models that maintain 3D spatial consistency across generated frames typically rely on explicit point cloud memory constructed in RGB space. This design is both computationally expensive, requiring repeated rendering and VAE encoding, and inherently lossy, as the round trip through pixel space discards rich features of the learned latent representation. In this paper, we introduce latent spatial memory for video world models, a persistent 3D cache that stores scene information directly in the diffusion latent space, avoiding pixel-space reconstruction. Building on this, we propose Mirage, a latent-space spatial memory framework that constructs the memory by lifting latent tokens into 3D via depth-guided back-projection and queries it by synthesizing novel views through direct latent-space warping. This unified formulation eliminates both the information loss of pixel-space reconstruction and the computational burden of repeated encoding and rendering. Experiments show that latent spatial memory achieves up to 10.57times faster end-to-end video generation and 55times reduction in memory footprint relative to explicit 3D baselines. Leveraging the geometric prior of the diffusion model, Mirage attains state-of-the-art performance on WorldScore and strong reconstruction quality on RealEstate10K.

We present ShadowDancer, a novel approach to any-action, frame-level control of interactive video world models. The obstacle is representational: existing interfaces either encode an action loosely, leaving how it unfolds for the model to improvise, or encode it exactly through structured signals that serve one family and are hard to acquire, so precise control across diverse dynamics remains impractical. Demonstration videos are the natural remedy, specifying any dynamics frame by frame; yet a video shows its dynamics only through one particular appearance, a single shadow of the underlying dynamics, so actions learned from demonstrations transfer poorly to new scenes. ShadowDancer addresses this with two key innovations: (1) shadow pairs, video pairs that replay the same dynamics under independently resampled appearance, constructed at scale by our Shadow Library, so that a dynamics family becomes controllable exactly when such pairs can be constructed for it; and (2) cross-shadow prediction, which learns actions by predicting one shadow from the other, so that whatever the pairing resamples is discarded by construction and whatever it preserves becomes the action, yielding a unified dynamics representation that drives a block-causal world model. Any demonstrated clip thus becomes a reusable action asset, replayed in new environments without action labels, motion estimators, or fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate improved action transfer and long action rollout over strong latent-action and interactive world model baselines across diverse dynamics families, with an average blinded win rate of 86% in rollout comparisons. We show video results at https://ShadowDancer-1.github.io

Modeling dynamic 3D environments from LiDAR sequences is central to building reliable 4D worlds for autonomous driving and embodied AI. Existing generative frameworks, however, often treat all spatial regions uniformly, overlooking the varying uncertainty across real-world scenes. This uniform generation leads to artifacts in complex or ambiguous regions, limiting realism and temporal stability. In this work, we present U4D, an uncertainty-aware framework for 4D LiDAR world modeling. Our approach first estimates spatial uncertainty maps from a pretrained segmentation model to localize semantically challenging regions. It then performs generation in a "hard-to-easy" manner through two sequential stages: (1) uncertainty-region modeling, which reconstructs high-entropy regions with fine geometric fidelity, and (2) uncertainty-conditioned completion, which synthesizes the remaining areas under learned structural priors. To further ensure temporal coherence, U4D incorporates a mixture of spatio-temporal (MoST) block that adaptively fuses spatial and temporal representations during diffusion. Extensive experiments show that U4D produces geometrically faithful and temporally consistent LiDAR sequences, advancing the reliability of 4D world modeling for autonomous perception and simulation.

Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to down-stream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesize new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

TD-MPC is a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that performs local trajectory optimization in the latent space of a learned implicit (decoder-free) world model. In this work, we present TD-MPC2: a series of improvements upon the TD-MPC algorithm. We demonstrate that TD-MPC2 improves significantly over baselines across 104 online RL tasks spanning 4 diverse task domains, achieving consistently strong results with a single set of hyperparameters. We further show that agent capabilities increase with model and data size, and successfully train a single 317M parameter agent to perform 80 tasks across multiple task domains, embodiments, and action spaces. We conclude with an account of lessons, opportunities, and risks associated with large TD-MPC2 agents. Explore videos, models, data, code, and more at https://nicklashansen.github.io/td-mpc2

We release Code World Model (CWM), a 32-billion-parameter open-weights LLM, to advance research on code generation with world models. To improve code understanding beyond what can be learned from training on static code alone, we mid-train CWM on a large amount of observation-action trajectories from Python interpreter and agentic Docker environments, and perform extensive multi-task reasoning RL in verifiable coding, math, and multi-turn software engineering environments. With CWM, we provide a strong testbed for researchers to explore the opportunities world modeling affords for improving code generation with reasoning and planning in computational environments. We present first steps of how world models can benefit agentic coding, enable step-by-step simulation of Python code execution, and show early results of how reasoning can benefit from the latter. CWM is a dense, decoder-only LLM trained with a context size of up to 131k tokens. Independent of its world modeling capabilities, CWM offers strong performance on general coding and math tasks: it reaches pass@1 scores of 65.8% on SWE-bench Verified (with test-time scaling), 68.6% on LiveCodeBench, 96.6% on Math-500, and 76.0% on AIME 2024. To support further research on code world modeling, we release model checkpoints after mid-training, SFT, and RL.

World models learn to predict future states of an environment, enabling planning and mental simulation. Current approaches default to Transformer-based predictors operating in learned latent spaces. This comes at a cost: O(N^2) computation and no explicit spatial inductive bias. This paper asks a foundational question: is self-attention necessary for predictive world modeling, or can alternative computational substrates achieve comparable or superior results? I introduce FluidWorld, a proof-of-concept world model whose predictive dynamics are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) of reaction-diffusion type. Instead of using a separate neural network predictor, the PDE integration itself produces the future state prediction. In a strictly parameter-matched three-way ablation on unconditional UCF-101 video prediction (64x64, ~800K parameters, identical encoder, decoder, losses, and data), FluidWorld is compared against both a Transformer baseline (self-attention) and a ConvLSTM baseline (convolutional recurrence). While all three models converge to comparable single-step prediction loss, FluidWorld achieves 2x lower reconstruction error, produces representations with 10-15% higher spatial structure preservation and 18-25% more effective dimensionality, and critically maintains coherent multi-step rollouts where both baselines degrade rapidly. All experiments were conducted on a single consumer-grade PC (Intel Core i5, NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti), without any large-scale compute. These results establish that PDE-based dynamics, which natively provide O(N) spatial complexity, adaptive computation, and global spatial coherence through diffusion, are a viable and parameter-efficient alternative to both attention and convolutional recurrence for world modeling.

We introduce Cosmos, a framework for object-centric world modeling that is designed for compositional generalization (CG), i.e., high performance on unseen input scenes obtained through the composition of known visual "atoms." The central insight behind Cosmos is the use of a novel form of neurosymbolic grounding. Specifically, the framework introduces two new tools: (i) neurosymbolic scene encodings, which represent each entity in a scene using a real vector computed using a neural encoder, as well as a vector of composable symbols describing attributes of the entity, and (ii) a neurosymbolic attention mechanism that binds these entities to learned rules of interaction. Cosmos is end-to-end differentiable; also, unlike traditional neurosymbolic methods that require representations to be manually mapped to symbols, it computes an entity's symbolic attributes using vision-language foundation models. Through an evaluation that considers two different forms of CG on an established blocks-pushing domain, we show that the framework establishes a new state-of-the-art for CG in world modeling.

The goal of this paper is to improve the performance and reliability of vision-language-action (VLA) models through iterative online interaction. Since collecting policy rollouts in the real world is expensive, we investigate whether a learned simulator-specifically, an action-conditioned video generation model-can be used to generate additional rollout data. Unfortunately, existing world models lack the physical fidelity necessary for policy improvement: they are predominantly trained on demonstration datasets that lack coverage of many different physical interactions (particularly failure cases) and struggle to accurately model small yet critical physical details in contact-rich object manipulation. We propose a simple iterative improvement algorithm that uses real-world roll-out data to improve the fidelity of the world model, which can then, in turn, be used to generate supplemental synthetic data for improving the VLA model. In our experiments on a real robot, we use this approach to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art VLA model on multiple downstream tasks. We achieve a 39.2% absolute success rate improvement over the base policy and 11.6% improvement from training with the generated synthetic rollouts. Videos can be found at this anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/vla-w

Recent game world models can synthesize visually plausible, action-conditioned rollouts. However, their interaction behaviors often remain limited to exploratory or wandering trajectories, and physical dynamics are typically learned as implicit correlations from data rather than as controllable variables. This limitation hinders their applicability to authored game environments, where physical rules are deliberately designed and require explicit manipulation. We introduce PhysEditWorld, a multimodal dataset with physical parameters, with a primary focus on gravity in this initial version. At its core, PhysEditWorld is built upon a replay paradigm implemented with a UE5 replay-and-rendering pipeline. Each scenario records a normalized action trace and replays the same initial state, character controller, action sequence, and camera policy under multiple gravity configurations, enabling controlled and attributable physical variation. PhysEditWorld contains 12 cinematic UE5 scenes, over 100 hours of gameplay interactions, and more than 60 million rendered rollout frames. Each sample provides synchronized multimodal signals, including RGB, depth, normals, audio, action traces, camera trajectory, engine states, semantic annotations, and explicit gravity labels. We further conduct initial utility studies on both generative video models and world understanding models, demonstrating that PhysEditWorld enables improved gravity-faithful dynamics modeling, enhances consistency under physical edits, and provides a scalable foundation for controllable world modeling research.

Videos inherently represent 2D projections of a dynamic 3D world. However, our analysis suggests that video diffusion models trained solely on raw video data often fail to capture meaningful geometric-aware structure in their learned representations. To bridge this gap between video diffusion models and the underlying 3D nature of the physical world, we propose Geometry Forcing, a simple yet effective method that encourages video diffusion models to internalize latent 3D representations. Our key insight is to guide the model's intermediate representations toward geometry-aware structure by aligning them with features from a pretrained geometric foundation model. To this end, we introduce two complementary alignment objectives: Angular Alignment, which enforces directional consistency via cosine similarity, and Scale Alignment, which preserves scale-related information by regressing unnormalized geometric features from normalized diffusion representation. We evaluate Geometry Forcing on both camera view-conditioned and action-conditioned video generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves visual quality and 3D consistency over the baseline methods. Project page: https://GeometryForcing.github.io.

A long-standing challenge in AI is to develop agents capable of solving a wide range of physical tasks and generalizing to new, unseen tasks and environments. A popular recent approach involves training a world model from state-action trajectories and subsequently use it with a planning algorithm to solve new tasks. Planning is commonly performed in the input space, but a recent family of methods has introduced planning algorithms that optimize in the learned representation space of the world model, with the promise that abstracting irrelevant details yields more efficient planning. In this work, we characterize models from this family as JEPA-WMs and investigate the technical choices that make algorithms from this class work. We propose a comprehensive study of several key components with the objective of finding the optimal approach within the family. We conducted experiments using both simulated environments and real-world robotic data, and studied how the model architecture, the training objective, and the planning algorithm affect planning success. We combine our findings to propose a model that outperforms two established baselines, DINO-WM and V-JEPA-2-AC, in both navigation and manipulation tasks. Code, data and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/jepa-wms.

Across robotics, World Models (WMs) are increasingly used to evaluate action policies by simulating the consequences of actions in an imagined world, and returning a success or safety verdict. Yet a verdict is only as trustworthy as the WM that produced it, and the WM itself needs to be certified. In video-generation WMs, fidelity metrics such as Fréchet Video Distance (FVD) reward visual realism, but ignore whether the world responds correctly to the policy's actions, including those unseen in training. Classical simulation-based validation assumes a trusted simulator evaluating an untrusted policy, whereas generative WMs are themselves unverified learned artifacts. Hence, we argue that any WM used as a test oracle must first be accredited before its verdicts can serve as evidence. Building on credibility practices from safety-critical simulation, including Verification, Validation & Accreditation (VV&A), Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF), and scenario-based testing standards, we define an admissibility ladder (L0-L4) that a WM must climb before its closed-loop verdicts are accepted as assurance evidence. Our framework is embodiment-agnostic, and is instantiated in autonomous driving (AD), where assurance methods for traditional simulation are most mature. Applied to two driving WMs, the lower rungs reveal a reversal: the model that ranks higher on visual generation quality (L0) ranks lower on action-following (L1-L2), so visual fidelity does not predict the action-robustness a closed-loop verdict depends on.

This paper addresses the general problem of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. In 2013, our large RL recurrent neural networks (RNNs) learned from scratch to drive simulated cars from high-dimensional video input. However, real brains are more powerful in many ways. In particular, they learn a predictive model of their initially unknown environment, and somehow use it for abstract (e.g., hierarchical) planning and reasoning. Guided by algorithmic information theory, we describe RNN-based AIs (RNNAIs) designed to do the same. Such an RNNAI can be trained on never-ending sequences of tasks, some of them provided by the user, others invented by the RNNAI itself in a curious, playful fashion, to improve its RNN-based world model. Unlike our previous model-building RNN-based RL machines dating back to 1990, the RNNAI learns to actively query its model for abstract reasoning and planning and decision making, essentially "learning to think." The basic ideas of this report can be applied to many other cases where one RNN-like system exploits the algorithmic information content of another. They are taken from a grant proposal submitted in Fall 2014, and also explain concepts such as "mirror neurons." Experimental results will be described in separate papers.

A World Model is a generative model used to simulate an environment. World Models have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal representations of Reinforcement Learning environments. In some cases, a World Model offers an agent the opportunity to learn entirely inside of its own dream environment. In this work we explore improving the generalization capabilities from dream environments to real environments (Dream2Real). We present a general approach to improve a controller's ability to transfer from a neural network dream environment to reality at little additional cost. These improvements are gained by drawing on inspiration from Domain Randomization, where the basic idea is to randomize as much of a simulator as possible without fundamentally changing the task at hand. Generally, Domain Randomization assumes access to a pre-built simulator with configurable parameters but oftentimes this is not available. By training the World Model using dropout, the dream environment is capable of creating a nearly infinite number of different dream environments. Previous use cases of dropout either do not use dropout at inference time or averages the predictions generated by multiple sampled masks (Monte-Carlo Dropout). Dropout's Dream Land leverages each unique mask to create a diverse set of dream environments. Our experimental results show that Dropout's Dream Land is an effective technique to bridge the reality gap between dream environments and reality. Furthermore, we additionally perform an extensive set of ablation studies.

The choice of representation plays a key role in self-driving. Bird's eye view (BEV) representations have shown remarkable performance in recent years. In this paper, we propose to learn object-centric representations in BEV to distill a complex scene into more actionable information for self-driving. We first learn to place objects into slots with a slot attention model on BEV sequences. Based on these object-centric representations, we then train a transformer to learn to drive as well as reason about the future of other vehicles. We found that object-centric slot representations outperform both scene-level and object-level approaches that use the exact attributes of objects. Slot representations naturally incorporate information about objects from their spatial and temporal context such as position, heading, and speed without explicitly providing it. Our model with slots achieves an increased completion rate of the provided routes and, consequently, a higher driving score, with a lower variance across multiple runs, affirming slots as a reliable alternative in object-centric approaches. Additionally, we validate our model's performance as a world model through forecasting experiments, demonstrating its capability to predict future slot representations accurately. The code and the pre-trained models can be found at https://kuis-ai.github.io/CarFormer/.

What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be internalized within the system itself rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between agentic systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and agentive systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) underpin a growing family of latent world models for control from raw pixels, but every existing JEPA world model commits at training time to a single inference paradigm: either trajectory optimisation in a learned dynamics model, or direct behaviour cloning. A single checkpoint that serves both would defer this choice to inference, when deployment constraints (rollout cost, observation accessibility) determine which path wins. We present Qantara, an end-to-end JEPA whose joint training objective pairs a Brownian-bridge interpolant between consecutive clean latents on the state axis with noise-to-data flow matching on the action axis. The same checkpoint serves three inference paradigms without retraining: latent planning, behaviour-cloning action sampling, and inverse dynamics, which we query through a video-inverse composition that first predicts the next latent without action conditioning, then extracts the action. Training concentrates mass on the edges of the (action-time, state-time) noise square, where inference queries the predictor: replacing it with uniform interior sampling drops Push-T planning from 90.1 to 53.3 SR at matched compute. On the LeWM control suite, Qantara reaches a 91.2 SR three-train-seed average and sets new SOTA on OGBench-Cube (+7.7 SR over DINO-WM, +19.7 over LeWM). From the same weights, the behaviour-cloning and video-inverse paths reach 82-83 SR on Push-T and 71-73 SR on Cube. These results move JEPA world models from single-paradigm planners to multi-paradigm controllers.

How should an agent decide when and how to plan? A dominant approach builds agents as reactive policies with adaptive computation (e.g., chain-of-thought), trained end-to-end expecting planning to emerge implicitly. Without control over the presence, structure, or horizon of planning, these systems dramatically increase reasoning length, yielding inefficient token use without reliable accuracy gains. We argue efficient agentic reasoning benefits from decomposing decision-making into three systems: simulative reasoning (System II) grounding deliberation in future-state prediction via a world model; self-regulation (System III) deciding when and how deeply to plan via a learned configurator; and reactive execution (System I) handling fine-grained action. Simulative reasoning provides unified planning across diverse tasks without per-domain engineering, while self-regulation ensures the planner is invoked only when needed. To test this, we develop SR^2AM (Self-Regulated Simulative Reasoning Agentic LLM), realizing both as distinct stages within an LLM's chain-of-thought, with the LLM as world model. We explore two instantiations: recording decisions from a prompted multi-module system (v0.1) and reconstructing structured plans from traces of pretrained reasoning LLMs (v1.0), trained via supervised then reinforcement learning (RL). Across math, science, tabular analysis, and web information seeking, v0.1-8B and v1.0-30B achieve Pass@1 competitive with 120-355B and 685B-1T parameter systems respectively, while v1.0-30B uses 25.8-95.3% fewer reasoning tokens than comparable agentic LLMs. RL increases average planning horizon by 22.8% while planning frequency grows only 2.0%, showing it learns to plan further ahead rather than more often. More broadly, learned self-regulation instantiates a principle we expect to extend beyond planning to how agents govern their own learning and adaptation.

Going beyond predicting robot actions, World Action Models (WAMs) can also generate future visual observations. We build on this generative capability to propose Recurrent Generative Replay (REGEN), a continual imitation learning framework that synthesizes pseudo-replay trajectories, enabling a robot policy to rehearse previously learned tasks without storing their original human demonstrations. During continual adaptation, REGEN recursively queries the WAM to synthesize pseudo-replay trajectories conditioned only on prior task instructions and current-task observations. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation settings show that REGEN reduces catastrophic forgetting by up to 50% relative to sequential fine-tuning, while approaching the performance of privileged experience replay methods that require access to real replay data. Finally, we analyze the factors limiting generated replay, identifying long-horizon visual degradation and action-observation inconsistency as the primary bottlenecks. Our results establish WAMs as a promising foundation for continual robot learning without stored demonstrations.

World Action Models (WAMs) extend robot policy learning by incorporating future prediction as an additional training objective, encouraging the policy to encode task-relevant temporal structure in its representations. Current WAMs often rely on large-scale generative architectures that incur high training costs and inference latency, making them difficult to deploy as efficient closed-loop policies. We propose Light-WAM, a lightweight World Action Model for efficient robot manipulation. Specifically, it is built with a compact video backbone and performs future-video supervision in a downsampled latent space, reducing the cost of video co-training while retaining its benefits for representation learning. For action prediction, Light-WAM introduces the StateFusionActionExpert, which reads adapted states from multiple backbone layers, fuses them through learned-query pooling, and directly predicts action chunks in a single forward pass. This design provides an efficient interface between video backbone representations and robot actions, avoiding the need for heavy generative action experts. Experiments demonstrate that Light-WAM maintains strong performance on LIBERO and achieves usable multi-task performance on RoboTwin 2.0, while using only 0.44B trainable parameters. It also achieves 72.03ms inference latency with 4.1GiB peak GPU memory and improved training throughput.

While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive success in image denoising with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), their performance remains limited on real-world noisy photographs. The main reason is that their learned models are easy to overfit on the simplified AWGN model which deviates severely from the complicated real-world noise model. In order to improve the generalization ability of deep CNN denoisers, we suggest training a convolutional blind denoising network (CBDNet) with more realistic noise model and real-world noisy-clean image pairs. On the one hand, both signal-dependent noise and in-camera signal processing pipeline is considered to synthesize realistic noisy images. On the other hand, real-world noisy photographs and their nearly noise-free counterparts are also included to train our CBDNet. To further provide an interactive strategy to rectify denoising result conveniently, a noise estimation subnetwork with asymmetric learning to suppress under-estimation of noise level is embedded into CBDNet. Extensive experimental results on three datasets of real-world noisy photographs clearly demonstrate the superior performance of CBDNet over state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code has been made available at https://github.com/GuoShi28/CBDNet.

This paper studies the problem of real-world video super-resolution (VSR) for animation videos, and reveals three key improvements for practical animation VSR. First, recent real-world super-resolution approaches typically rely on degradation simulation using basic operators without any learning capability, such as blur, noise, and compression. In this work, we propose to learn such basic operators from real low-quality animation videos, and incorporate the learned ones into the degradation generation pipeline. Such neural-network-based basic operators could help to better capture the distribution of real degradations. Second, a large-scale high-quality animation video dataset, AVC, is built to facilitate comprehensive training and evaluations for animation VSR. Third, we further investigate an efficient multi-scale network structure. It takes advantage of the efficiency of unidirectional recurrent networks and the effectiveness of sliding-window-based methods. Thanks to the above delicate designs, our method, AnimeSR, is capable of restoring real-world low-quality animation videos effectively and efficiently, achieving superior performance to previous state-of-the-art methods. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AnimeSR.

Can world knowledge learned by large language models (LLMs) be used to act in interactive environments? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of grounding high-level tasks, expressed in natural language (e.g. "make breakfast"), to a chosen set of actionable steps (e.g. "open fridge"). While prior work focused on learning from explicit step-by-step examples of how to act, we surprisingly find that if pre-trained LMs are large enough and prompted appropriately, they can effectively decompose high-level tasks into mid-level plans without any further training. However, the plans produced naively by LLMs often cannot map precisely to admissible actions. We propose a procedure that conditions on existing demonstrations and semantically translates the plans to admissible actions. Our evaluation in the recent VirtualHome environment shows that the resulting method substantially improves executability over the LLM baseline. The conducted human evaluation reveals a trade-off between executability and correctness but shows a promising sign towards extracting actionable knowledge from language models. Website at https://huangwl18.github.io/language-planner

Foundation models (FMs), large deep learning models pre-trained on vast, unlabeled datasets, exhibit powerful capabilities in understanding complex patterns and generating sophisticated outputs. However, they often struggle to adapt to specific tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL), which allows agents to learn through interaction and feedback, offers a compelling solution. Integrating RL with FMs enables these models to achieve desired outcomes and excel at particular tasks. Additionally, RL can be enhanced by leveraging the reasoning and generalization capabilities of FMs. This synergy is revolutionizing various fields, including robotics. FMs, rich in knowledge and generalization, provide robots with valuable information, while RL facilitates learning and adaptation through real-world interactions. This survey paper comprehensively explores this exciting intersection, examining how these paradigms can be integrated to advance robotic intelligence. We analyze the use of foundation models as action planners, the development of robotics-specific foundation models, and the mutual benefits of combining FMs with RL. Furthermore, we present a taxonomy of integration approaches, including large language models, vision-language models, diffusion models, and transformer-based RL models. We also explore how RL can utilize world representations learned from FMs to enhance robotic task execution. Our survey aims to synthesize current research and highlight key challenges in robotic reasoning and control, particularly in the context of integrating FMs and RL--two rapidly evolving technologies. By doing so, we seek to spark future research and emphasize critical areas that require further investigation to enhance robotics. We provide an updated collection of papers based on our taxonomy, accessible on our open-source project website at: https://github.com/clmoro/Robotics-RL-FMs-Integration.

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile sensing for robotic manipulation by learning a neural, tactile-informed dynamics model. Our proposed framework, RoboPack, employs a recurrent graph neural network to estimate object states, including particles and object-level latent physics information, from historical visuo-tactile observations and to perform future state predictions. Our tactile-informed dynamics model, learned from real-world data, can solve downstream robotics tasks with model-predictive control. We demonstrate our approach on a real robot equipped with a compliant Soft-Bubble tactile sensor on non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing tasks, where the robot must infer the physics properties of objects from direct and indirect interactions. Trained on only an average of 30 minutes of real-world interaction data per task, our model can perform online adaptation and make touch-informed predictions. Through extensive evaluations in both long-horizon dynamics prediction and real-world manipulation, our method demonstrates superior effectiveness compared to previous learning-based and physics-based simulation systems.

Dense 3D tracking from monocular video is fundamental to dynamic scene understanding. While recent 3D foundation models provide reliable per-frame geometry, recovering object motion in this geometry remains challenging and benefits from strong motion priors learned from real-world videos. Existing 3D trackers either follow iterative paradigms trained from scratch on synthetic data or fine-tune 3D reconstruction models learned from static multi-view images, both lacking real-world motion priors. Pre-trained video diffusion transformers (video DiTs) offer rich spatio-temporal priors from internet-scale videos, making them a promising foundation for 3D tracking. However, their frame-anchored formulation, which generates each frame's content, is fundamentally mismatched with reference-anchored dense 3D tracking, which must follow the same physical points from a reference frame across time. We present TrackCraft3R, the first method to repurpose a video DiT as a feed-forward dense 3D tracker. Given a monocular video and its frame-anchored reconstruction pointmap, TrackCraft3R predicts a reference-anchored tracking pointmap that follows every pixel of the first frame across time in a single forward pass, along with its visibility. We achieve this through two designs: (i) a dual-latent representation that uses per-frame geometry latents and reference-anchored track latents as dense queries, and (ii) temporal RoPE alignment, which specifies the target timestamp of each track latent. Together, these designs convert the per-frame generative paradigm of video DiTs into a reference-anchored tracking formulation with LoRA fine-tuning. TrackCraft3R achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard sparse and dense 3D tracking benchmarks, while running 1.3x faster and using 4.6x less peak memory than the strongest prior method. We further demonstrate robustness to large motions and long videos.

Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

We describe a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in diverse, open-world environments. At the core of our method is a learned latent variable model of distances and actions, along with a non-parametric topological memory of images. We use an information bottleneck to regularize the learned policy, giving us (i) a compact visual representation of goals, (ii) improved generalization capabilities, and (iii) a mechanism for sampling feasible goals for exploration. Trained on a large offline dataset of prior experience, the model acquires a representation of visual goals that is robust to task-irrelevant distractors. We demonstrate our method on a mobile ground robot in open-world exploration scenarios. Given an image of a goal that is up to 80 meters away, our method leverages its representation to explore and discover the goal in under 20 minutes, even amidst previously-unseen obstacles and weather conditions. Please check out the project website for videos of our experiments and information about the real-world dataset used at https://sites.google.com/view/recon-robot.

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert demonstrations is slow, costly, and risky. However, most existing offline RL works assume the dataset is already labeled with the task rewards, a process that often requires significant human effort, especially when ground-truth states are hard to ascertain (e.g., in the real-world). In this paper, we build on prior work, specifically RL-VLM-F, and propose a novel system that automatically generates reward labels for offline datasets using preference feedback from a vision-language model and a text description of the task. Our method then learns a policy using offline RL with the reward-labeled dataset. We demonstrate the system's applicability to a complex real-world robot-assisted dressing task, where we first learn a reward function using a vision-language model on a sub-optimal offline dataset, and then we use the learned reward to employ Implicit Q learning to develop an effective dressing policy. Our method also performs well in simulation tasks involving the manipulation of rigid and deformable objects, and significantly outperform baselines such as behavior cloning and inverse RL. In summary, we propose a new system that enables automatic reward labeling and policy learning from unlabeled, sub-optimal offline datasets.

Open-world instance segmentation is the task of grouping pixels into object instances without any pre-determined taxonomy. This is challenging, as state-of-the-art methods rely on explicit class semantics obtained from large labeled datasets, and out-of-domain evaluation performance drops significantly. Here we propose a novel approach for mask proposals, Generic Grouping Networks (GGNs), constructed without semantic supervision. Our approach combines a local measure of pixel affinity with instance-level mask supervision, producing a training regimen designed to make the model as generic as the data diversity allows. We introduce a method for predicting Pairwise Affinities (PA), a learned local relationship between pairs of pixels. PA generalizes very well to unseen categories. From PA we construct a large set of pseudo-ground-truth instance masks; combined with human-annotated instance masks we train GGNs and significantly outperform the SOTA on open-world instance segmentation on various benchmarks including COCO, LVIS, ADE20K, and UVO. Code is available on project website: https://sites.google.com/view/generic-grouping/.

The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.

Industrial recommender systems face two fundamental limitations under the log-driven paradigm: (1) knowledge poverty in ID-based item representations that causes brittle interest modeling under data sparsity, and (2) systemic blindness to beyond-log user interests that constrains model performance within platform boundaries. These limitations stem from an over-reliance on shallow interaction statistics and close-looped feedback while neglecting the rich world knowledge about product semantics and cross-domain behavioral patterns that Large Language Models have learned from vast corpora. To address these challenges, we introduce ReaSeq, a reasoning-enhanced framework that leverages world knowledge in Large Language Models to address both limitations through explicit and implicit reasoning. Specifically, ReaSeq employs explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning via multi-agent collaboration to distill structured product knowledge into semantically enriched item representations, and latent reasoning via Diffusion Large Language Models to infer plausible beyond-log behaviors. Deployed on Taobao's ranking system serving hundreds of millions of users, ReaSeq achieves substantial gains: >6.0% in IPV and CTR, >2.9% in Orders, and >2.5% in GMV, validating the effectiveness of world-knowledge-enhanced reasoning over purely log-driven approaches.

Test-time reasoning significantly enhances pre-trained AI agents' performance. However, it requires an explicit environment model, often unavailable or overly complex in real-world scenarios. While MuZero enables effective model learning for search in perfect information games, extending this paradigm to imperfect information games presents substantial challenges due to more nuanced look-ahead reasoning techniques and large number of states relevant for individual decisions. This paper introduces an algorithm LAMIR that learns an abstracted model of an imperfect information game directly from the agent-environment interaction. During test time, this trained model is used to perform look-ahead reasoning. The learned abstraction limits the size of each subgame to a manageable size, making theoretically principled look-ahead reasoning tractable even in games where previous methods could not scale. We empirically demonstrate that with sufficient capacity, LAMIR learns the exact underlying game structure, and with limited capacity, it still learns a valuable abstraction, which improves game playing performance of the pre-trained agents even in large games.

Interactive multimodal agents must convert raw visual observations into coherent sequences of language-conditioned actions -- a capability that current vision-language models (VLMs) still lack. Earlier reinforcement-learning (RL) efforts could, in principle, endow VLMs with such skills, but they have seldom tested whether the learned behaviours generalize beyond their training simulators, and they depend either on brittle hyperparameter tuning or on dense-reward environments with low state variability. We introduce Vision-Language Decoupled Actor-Critic (VL-DAC), a lightweight, hyperparameter-free RL algorithm. VL-DAC applies PPO updates to action tokens while learning value only at the environment-step level: an arrangement, to our knowledge, not previously explored for large VLMs or LLMs. This simple decoupling removes unstable weighting terms and yields faster, more reliable convergence. Training a single VLM with VL-DAC in one inexpensive simulator at a time (MiniWorld, Gym-Cards, ALFWorld, or WebShop) already produces policies that generalize widely: +50\% relative on BALROG (game-centric agentic control), +5\% relative on the hardest part of VSI-Bench (spatial planning), and +2\% on VisualWebBench (web navigation), all without degrading general image understanding accuracy. These results provide the first evidence that a simple RL algorithm can train VLMs entirely in cheap synthetic worlds while delivering measurable gains on real-image agentic, spatial-reasoning, and web-navigation benchmarks.

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract <subject, predicate, object> relationships in images for vision understanding. Although recent works have made steady progress on SGG, they still suffer long-tail distribution issues that tail-predicates are more costly to train and hard to distinguish due to a small amount of annotated data compared to frequent predicates. Existing re-balancing strategies try to handle it via prior rules but are still confined to pre-defined conditions, which are not scalable for various models and datasets. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal prediCate boosting (CaCao) framework, where a visually-prompted language model is learned to generate diverse fine-grained predicates in a low-resource way. The proposed CaCao can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion and automatically strengthen existing SGG to tackle the long-tailed problem. Based on that, we further introduce a novel Entangled cross-modal prompt approach for open-world predicate scene graph generation (Epic), where models can generalize to unseen predicates in a zero-shot manner. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that CaCao consistently boosts the performance of multiple scene graph generation models in a model-agnostic way. Moreover, our Epic achieves competitive performance on open-world predicate prediction. The data and code for this paper are publicly available.

Learning an accurate model of the environment is essential for model-based control tasks. Existing methods in robotic visuomotor control usually learn from data with heavily labelled actions, object entities or locations, which can be demanding in many cases. To cope with this limitation, we propose a method, dubbed DMotion, that trains a forward model from video data only, via disentangling the motion of controllable agent to model the transition dynamics. An object extractor and an interaction learner are trained in an end-to-end manner without supervision. The agent's motions are explicitly represented using spatial transformation matrices containing physical meanings. In the experiments, DMotion achieves superior performance on learning an accurate forward model in a Grid World environment, as well as a more realistic robot control environment in simulation. With the accurate learned forward models, we further demonstrate their usage in model predictive control as an effective approach for robotic manipulations.

The AI community has been pursuing algorithms known as artificial general intelligence (AGI) that apply to any kind of real-world problem. Recently, chat systems powered by large language models (LLMs) emerge and rapidly become a promising direction to achieve AGI in natural language processing (NLP), but the path towards AGI in computer vision (CV) remains unclear. One may owe the dilemma to the fact that visual signals are more complex than language signals, yet we are interested in finding concrete reasons, as well as absorbing experiences from GPT and LLMs to solve the problem. In this paper, we start with a conceptual definition of AGI and briefly review how NLP solves a wide range of tasks via a chat system. The analysis inspires us that unification is the next important goal of CV. But, despite various efforts in this direction, CV is still far from a system like GPT that naturally integrates all tasks. We point out that the essential weakness of CV lies in lacking a paradigm to learn from environments, yet NLP has accomplished the task in the text world. We then imagine a pipeline that puts a CV algorithm (i.e., an agent) in world-scale, interactable environments, pre-trains it to predict future frames with respect to its action, and then fine-tunes it with instruction to accomplish various tasks. We expect substantial research and engineering efforts to push the idea forward and scale it up, for which we share our perspectives on future research directions.

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available. However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics. MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games - the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled - our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.