Language agents solve complex tasks through plans and actions. A single step the world refuses puts the goal out of reach, and what the agent does next decides the task. Prompted planners fail at exactly this point, rewriting the refused step in new words, meeting the same refusal, and burning the attempt budget without moving. They fail because the plan was never tied to the world, so a refusal has nothing in the plan to attach to. A world is where a task runs, and it has its own rules, its own admissible actions, and its own constraints. We build synthetic worlds across 7 domains and extract training data from them. A program enforces each world's rules and grades its goal, and every world is admitted only if its goal is reachable from its initial state. Agents run inside and leave verified failures paired with repairs that carried the run to a state the world certified, a record of about 226K trajectories. On this record we train the World State Generator, a model that writes a plan as checkable states of the world and keeps that plan aligned with the world it runs in. That alignment is what a plan written in language lacks, since the world it runs in has physical limits, logical dependencies, and required orders the language never states, and the plan encounters these rules only when a state fails. WSG takes that failure as the rule the world has stated and rewrites the remaining states to obey it, so the plan bends to the world as the run goes on. Across 7 public benchmarks, WSG raises end-to-end success for two open models near 30B parameters over prompting and brings to the level of proprietary model.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Left: worlds are built from entities, rules, and a goal, and a world is kept only if its goal is reachable from its initial state. Middle: agents run the SDP loop inside these worlds. When the world refutes a state, the certified prefix stays and the rest of the chain is rewritten. Right: each refutation becomes a training pair, the input (g,c,τ) and the rewritten chain. A pair is kept when the rewritten chain reaches a state the world certifies, whether or not the run later reaches the goal.
Domain
Component
Description
Physical
Entities
Objects with locations and properties.
Actions
Primitive actions such as open, move, and combine.
Enforced rule
An action whose precondition does not hold changes nothing.
Goal check
The goal predicate on the final configuration.
Admission
Exhaustive search over configurations.
Software
Entities
An index of Wikipedia documents.
Table 1: Entities, actions, enforced rules, goal checks, and admission criteria for the 7 domains.
Domain
What the program decides
Model
Episodes
Refuted (%)
Reached (%)
Repair calls
Kept (%)
Physical
the goal check on the engine state
Qwen3-32B
11,064
90.6
24.9
85,921
33.3
Qwen3.6-27B
10,614
91.5
19.1
87,231
39.2
Gemma4-31B
10,097
87.9
19.0
80,134
15.8
Software
the submitted answer against the gold answer
Qwen3-32B
11,040
86.2
43.4
37,870
27.0
Qwen3.6-27B
10,239
69.4
60.6
27,357
30.7
Gemma4-31B
10,380
67.3
53.0
28,200
33.3
Table 2: 7 domains, what the program grades in each, and what each extraction model produced inside them. Episodes counts runs of the SDP loop, Refuted the share of episodes in which the world refuted at least one state, and Reached the share that certified the goal. Repair calls counts the repair calls the proposer made, and Kept the share of those that survived the corpus filters. Intermediate states are judged by the validator, by a program in reasoning worlds, and the goal by the program in every domain.
Gemma4-31B
Qwen3.6-27B
Benchmark
Metric
Proprietary models (published)
SDP
WSG
SDP
WSG
τ2 -bench
Accuracy
46.3 Gemini-2.5-Pro
53.7 Sonnet-4
54.3 GPT-4.1
79.9 GPT-5-Think
42.5
56.3 (+13.8)
68.3
76.6 (+8.3)
ScienceWorld
Average score
36.4 GPT-4 ReAct
39.2 GPT-4 CoT
45.3 GPT-4 Reflexion
47.9 GPT-4 Plan-and-Act
35.8
44.4 (+8.6)
36.4
46.8 (+10.4)
ToolSandbox
Average score
64.3 GPT-4
65.6 GPT-3.5
69.2 Opus-3
73.0 GPT-4o
64.3
72.5 (+8.2)
64.7
69.6 (+4.9)
PlanBench-XL
Accuracy
51.9 GPT-5.4
52.2 Gemini-3.5-Flash
63.1 DeepSeek-V4-Flash
77.1 Gemini-3.1-Pro
38.5
53.9 (+15.4)
16.1
48.0 (+31.9)
REAL
Accuracy
25.0 o3-mini
35.0 Gemini-2.5-Pro
38.0 o3-pro
41.0 Sonnet-3.7
27.7
37.3 (+9.6)
22.6
40.2 (+17.6)
Table 3: Zero-shot performance on 7 agent benchmarks. SDP prompts the backbone for every proposer call, and WSG replaces the calls under τ with the trained model on the same backbone and runtime, with the gain over SDP in parentheses. Bold marks the best proprietary result and the best open result per row.
Gemma4-31B
Qwen3.6-27B
Benchmark
Recovery (%)
Steps
Replans
Time (s)
Recovery (%)
Steps
Replans
Time (s)
τ2 -bench
51.0 / 64.0
42.2 / 41.8
5.91 / 5.57
15.6 / 13.9
74.0 / 81.0
38.8 / 42.6
3.57 / 2.47
16.3 / 15.6
ScienceWorld
10.6 / 27.5
73.6 / 43.8
4.19 / 3.07
348 / 223
13.8 / 22.9
73.1 / 40.2
3.89 / 2.23
404 / 215
ToolSandbox
71.3 / 85.1
10.9 / 10.1
2.14 / 1.05
27 / 31
66.5 / 72.7
11.9 / 12.1
2.37 / 1.46
22 / 20
PlanBench-XL
40.2 / 63.1
32.0 / 30.7
1.90 / 4.55
307 / 335
20.8 / 48.4
32.8 / 36.2
1.30 / 4.26
259 / 353
REAL
17.2 / 25.0
33.6 / 27.6
3.94 / 2.43
832 / 376
18.9 / 23.0
41.9 / 28.6
3.92 / 2.01
1077 / 478
Table 4: Recovery after refutation and its cost, reported as SDP / WSG. Recovery is the share of episodes that reached the goal after at least one refutation. Steps counts messages per episode, Replans counts proposer calls under τ per episode, and Time is wall-clock seconds per episode.
World models are moving from generating realistic frames to generating playable worlds, yet whether a delivered world can keep running is not tested anywhere. Existing evaluations stop at generation, at delivery, or at single-step transitions, and each stops at a different point along the way. Correct local state transitions or intermediate outcomes do not guarantee a correctly organized causal event flow. We propose the world agent task, which moves the evaluation point of world generation from the moment of delivery to the continued operation that follows. In this task, a model is not asked to generate a world. It is held responsible for keeping the world running, which requires coordinating events and carrying forward their consequences to constrain subsequent evolution. We instantiate the task in WorldAgent-Benchmark with two complementary tracks. In the maintenance track, the model must ground the events of a continuous narrative into correct transitions of the explicit world state while respecting causal, temporal, and concurrency constraints. In the deduction track, the model must predict how the world will evolve under partial observations and act toward a goal. The maintenance track combines LLM-assisted semantic judgments with programmatic validation and scoring, while the deduction track is evaluated entirely programmatically. Individual judgments are auditable against world states and execution logs, and scores can be recomputed from the saved judgments and execution records. Across 8 models, scores decline steadily as pre-built structure is removed from the world, and causal-relation checking is the weakest component for every model. The benchmark makes the continued operation of a world measurable and distinguishes local completion from failures in event organization. Code and dataset will be released on https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/WorldAgent-Benchmark.
Weixing Chen, Weipeng Zhang, Nan An +2
Sun Yat-sen University · South China University of Technology · Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing +2
A world model predicts environment dynamics based on current observations and actions, serving as a core cognitive mechanism for reasoning and planning. In this work, we investigate how world modeling based on language models can further push the boundaries of general agents. (i) We first focus on building foundation models for agentic environment simulation. We introduce Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B and Qwen-AgentWorld-397B-A17B, the first language world models capable of simulating agentic environments covering 7 domains via long chain-of-thought reasoning. Leveraging more than 10M environment interaction trajectories of 7 domains in real-world environments, we develop Qwen-AgentWorld through a three-stage training pipeline: CPT injects general-purpose world modeling capabilities from the state transition dynamics and augmented professional corpora, SFT activates next-state-prediction reasoning, and RL sharpens simulation fidelity through a tailored framework with hybrid rubric-and-rule rewards. To evaluate language world models, we present AgentWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from real-world interactions of 5 frontier models on 9 established benchmarks. Empirical results demonstrate that Qwen-AgentWorld significantly outperforms existing frontier models. (ii) Beyond foundation models, we further investigate two complementary paradigms through which world modeling enhances general agents. First, as a decoupled environment simulator, Qwen-AgentWorld supports scalable and controllable simulation of thousands of real-world environments for agentic RL, yielding gains that surpass real-environment training alone. Second, as a unified agent foundation model, world-model training acts as a highly effective warm-up that improves downstream performance across 7 agentic benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-AgentWorld
When an interactive benchmark reports a single success rate for a language-model agent, it is rarely clear what that number measures. A failure can come from perception, ambiguous instructions, retrieval, missing commonsense about what actions do, an incorrect model of the dynamics, or planning, and an aggregate score does not separate them. LLM-BabyBench recasts the procedurally generated BabyAI gridworld as a fully observable, purely textual environment in which every source of failure but planning is removed by construction. The whole grid is serialised into the prompt, instructions come from a small formal grammar, every object's coordinate is stated, the six actions and their effects are specified, and a deterministic expert validates each answer by executing it rather than judging it. On this substrate we define the PPD suite: Predict asks for the state that follows an action sequence, Plan for an action sequence that reaches a goal, and Decompose for a subgoal sequence that achieves a mission, scored by three assistance-aware metrics that separate understanding a mission from sequencing it. Across seven frontier and open models, simulation is far ahead of planning for every model, near saturation for the strongest and well short of it for the weakest, and the length of the required solution, not grid size or obstacle count, governs planning failure. Each model has a characteristic horizon beyond which single-attempt success collapses. Where enough instances are solved to support the ratio, returned plans stay near-optimal. Models that write out their working show why: they commit to one family of corridor-shaped route and verify it with no means of backing out, so what they return is either near-optimal or invalid. The same pattern holds one level up: decomposition precision falls to zero on long missions even where comprehension persists.