RAN-JEPA: An Action-Conditioned World Model for Energy-efficient Mobile Network Control
Authors: Binghan Wu, Kai Zeng, Kai Yang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Joseph Sifakis, Ye Ouyang
Organizations: AsiaInfo Technologies, Beijing, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, China · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, China · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Verimag, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
Operational mobile networks are rich in observations but poor in interventions: they continuously generate large volumes of passive telemetry, while controlled action--response trajectories remain comparatively scarce and costly to collect. This observation--intervention asymmetry is a central obstacle to building practical world models for RAN control. We address this problem with RAN-JEPA, an action-conditioned world model that separates representation learning from intervention learning. The model first learns a predictive latent representation from observation-only network data, adapts that representation to the target deployment domain, and then learns action-conditioned latent dynamics from controlled sleep/wake trajectories while keeping the encoder fixed. We evaluate RAN-JEPA using public operator performance data for pretraining and a real-equipment four-cell 5G testbed for domain adaptation, post-training, and control. Across four future 15-minute intervals, RAN-JEPA achieves lower action-conditioned prediction error than a GPT-2 world-model baseline and a mechanistic rule, while remaining close to a strong persistence reference. What-if evaluation further shows that the model produces distinct and coherent future trajectories under matched SLEEP and KEEP plans. In closed-loop control, RAN-JEPA consistently supports higher sleep ratios than the two baselines at comparable congestion cost. These results show that observation-first, action-conditioned learning can turn abundant passive telemetry and limited intervention data into a practical predictive model for energy-aware RAN control.
The increasing complexity of mobile networks necessitates intelligent and dynamic control strategies for efficient, energy-conserving management. We propose a world model-based approach for network control that enables adaptive configuration of crucial parameters. The world model is trained from historical data and predicts the impact of its actions on future network states. Our controller leverages the model's uncertainty estimate to robustly find optimal network configuration changes. Furthermore, the optimization objective can be changed dynamically without model retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in simulated closed-loop control of a mobile network energy-saving feature. Our results show improved performance in balancing energy savings with quality of service, compared to traditional methods and reinforcement learning approaches. Finally, we show the world model performance on real network data from, and evaluate counterfactual actions proposed by the controller under various throughput constraints.
Maxime Bouton, Ioanna Mitsioni, Simon Lindståhl +1
Latent world models support efficient model predictive control from high-dimensional observations, yet optimizing a single learned latent objective can favor action sequences whose decoder-predicted terminal descriptor does not match the goal descriptor. We introduce Latent Energy Action Planning (LEAP), which treats the complete action horizon as a differentiable variable and optimizes it through a frozen LeWorldModel (LeWM). LEAP couples terminal latent goal matching with a terminal-window state energy. Low energy requires the predicted terminal latent to agree with the goal latent and the decoder-predicted terminal descriptor to agree with the goal descriptor. A frozen goal-conditioned proposal initializes the search, a quasi-Newton solver refines actions through the autoregressive rollout, and post-optimization projection enforces the admissible action range. Across four control domains using the officially released LeWM checkpoints, the complete LEAP planning system raises mean success from 77.5% for LeWM planned with the cross-entropy method (LeWM+CEM) to 94.8% under a matched protocol, a 17.3-percentage-point improvement, while retaining the frozen LeWM representation and predictor.
Phu Pham, Aniket Bera
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, USA
Time-series models increasingly condition on known future inputs. In controlled systems, some of these inputs are actions that can be changed, compared, and optimized before execution. A model must therefore do more than predict the realized future: it must predict how outcomes change under different actions from the same observed history and support reliable comparison of candidate plans. We introduce ActTime, an action-conditioned world model for time series. Over the observed history, ActTime updates variable-specific latent states through an action-conditioned transition and corrects them using observations. It then rolls the same transition forward under candidate actions to generate future trajectories. Training uses only factual trajectories, without paired alternative-action outcomes or planning supervision. We construct a simulator-grounded evaluation suite across building energy, traffic, greenhouse climate, and inventory management, covering factual prediction, intervention-effect prediction, offline decision making, and closed-loop planning. ActTime ranks first in 12 of 16 domain-task settings. Across eight methods, the mean pairwise model-ranking reversal rate is 17.8% between factual prediction and intervention fidelity, and rises to 28.4% between intervention fidelity and decision ranking. These results show that factual accuracy, intervention fidelity, and decision quality are related but not interchangeable.