World Model Learning

What does a world model learn from physical exploration, without any linguistic supervision? We argue the answer is organized by a single principle: the geometric structure of the physical world. Training a VAE-based world model on random embodied exploration, we find that its latent space develops spatial semantic structure that mirrors physical geometry -- direction accuracy 0.677+-0.029 versus 0.547 for a randomly initialized encoder, and position RSA 0.192+-0.047 versus 0.029 for random encoders (6.6x improvement), showing that training induces genuine structural organization beyond CNN inductive bias. Across 20 temporal checkpoints, prediction performance and semantic alignment co-improve (Spearman r=-0.61, p=0.004), consistent with the shared-driver account. We confirm this through a double knockout: standard KL regularization (beta=0.1) forces the encoder away from geometric structure, and both prediction performance and semantic alignment collapse simultaneously to near-chance by step 50,000 -- exactly as the shared-driver account predicts. Reducing beta to 0.001 restores geometric access and recovers both capabilities together. These findings establish physical world geometry as the organizing principle of world model representations, with direct implications for the design of semantically grounded embodied agents.

World models represent a paradigm shift in generative AI, pursuing predictive understanding and controllable simulation of environments in a structured and generalizable way. We present World Machine, a generative world-modeling architecture for time series. It is a transformer-based architecture with latent states that enables adaptation to different amounts of observed data and contexts. This shows an improvement over traditional transformers, which have a computational and memory cost that scales quadratically with the context. Experiments on a proposed synthetic dataset, Toy1D, validate the approach's feasibility, demonstrate capabilities not found in conventional transformers, and highlight the contributions of each component of the training protocol.

Embodied video world models typically capture both scene evolution and the robot's behavior, which we refer to as the \emph{world} and the \emph{ego}, respectively. The world and the ego exhibit different underlying dynamics: world prediction relies primarily on visual history and emphasizes scene stability, whereas ego prediction relies more strongly on the current instruction and emphasizes accurate instruction following. Modeling both components within a single generation stream can entangle these different dependencies, making it difficult to specialize the prediction of either component. Consequently, it becomes difficult to simultaneously maintain scene consistency and accurate instruction following, particularly in long-horizon navigation-manipulation tasks. In this paper, we propose to decompose an embodied video into the world and the ego and disentangle their generation processes. Specifically, we define the world as the background and currently unmanipulated objects, and the ego as the robot and currently manipulated objects. Based on this definition, we develop the \emph{World-Ego Model} (WEM), which combines a vision-language state predictor using role-conditioned attention (RCA) and asymmetric query budgets with a semantic-routed mixture-of-experts (SR-MoE) diffusion generator. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further construct HTEWorld, a dataset and benchmark for long-horizon embodied video generation with hybrid navigation-manipulation tasks, providing 125K training video clips comprising over 4.5M frames with fine-grained instructions, together with 300 multi-turn evaluation trajectories covering over 2K instructions. Extensive experiments show that WEM achieves state-of-the-art performance on HTEWorld while remaining competitive on existing manipulation-oriented evaluations.

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional modular pipelines by directly mapping raw sensor data to driving actions. While recent approaches achieve strong performance on single-domain datasets, their performance degrades significantly when trained jointly across multiple heterogeneous domains. In practice, however, autonomous systems must operate across diverse environments with heterogeneous distributions, including different cities, sensor configurations, and traffic patterns, without domain-specific retraining. This gap highlights a key challenge in multi-domain learning: domain-specific variations across heterogeneous domains introduce conflicting learning signals, driving models toward compromised solutions that are suboptimal across domains. To address this, we propose a trajectory-driven learning paradigm that organizes training around planning trajectories, enabling the model to capture domain-invariant representations of driving intent. Furthermore, we incorporate a world model that predicts future latent features conditioned on ego actions, improving feature consistency and mitigating domain-induced biases. We evaluate our approach on three benchmarks, nuScenes, NAVSIM, and the Waymo end-to-end dataset, and show substantial improvements over existing methods across all domains. Our results demonstrate that a single unified model can be trained on heterogeneous datasets while maintaining strong performance within each domain, highlighting a step toward scalable real-world deployment. We will make our code publicly available.

Inspired by the emergent behaviors in large language models that generalized human intelligence, the research community is pursuing similar emergent capabilities within world models, with a emphasis on modeling the physical world. Within the scope of physical world model, objects are the fundamental primitives that constitute physical reality. From humans to computers, nearly everything we interact with is an object. These objects are rarely static; they are actionable entities with varying states determined by their intrinsic properties. While current methods approach object action states either via video generation or dynamic scene reconstruction, none explicitly model this basic element in a unified, principled way to build an actionable object representation. We propose WorldString, a neural architecture capable of modeling the state manifold of real-world objects by learning directly from point clouds or RGB-D video streams. Serving as a versatile digital twin, it acts as a foundational building block for physical world models; thus, we name it WorldString. Sweetly, its fully differentiable structure seamlessly enables future integration with policy learning and neural dynamics.

Future 3D semantic occupancy forecasting and motion planning are central to autonomous driving, as they require models to reason about how surrounding scenes evolve and how the ego vehicle should act. Existing occupancy world models commonly discretize scenes into latent embeddings, volumetric features, or quantized tokens, and forecast future states through fixed-step autoregressive generation. This limits temporal flexibility, obscures scene evolution, accumulates errors over long horizons, and poorly matches the continuous-time dynamics of real driving scenes. We propose GEM, a Gaussian Evolution Model for non-autoregressive occupancy world modeling, where driving scenes are represented as explicit continuous 4D Gaussian primitives with learned dynamics. Instead of rolling out future occupancy states step by step, GEM directly queries the Gaussian world representation at arbitrary timestamps and splats the corresponding conditional 3D Gaussians into semantic occupancy volumes. This enables efficient forecasting over the full horizon while retaining a compact and interpretable scene representation. By decoupling spatial geometry, temporal support, and primitive motion, GEM makes the predicted world easier to inspect, as each primitive's evolution can be followed continuously over time. The same representation also supports motion planning by predicting future ego trajectories from the learned Gaussian world. Extensive experiments show that GEM achieves state-of-the-art future semantic occupancy forecasting and strong motion planning performance, while providing flexible temporal querying.

Radiologist eye-tracking data provide a rich record of how experts search, compare, and accumulate evidence during image reading; yet, existing methods exploit this signal only partially, either as a static spatial prior or as an auxiliary prediction target decoupled from diagnosis. We propose GazeWorld, a medical imaging world model that treats the image as the world and the radiologist's fixation sequence as a trajectory through it. GazeWorld autoregressively predicts the latent representation of the next fixated patch from all previously visited ones, while a spatial-completion branch covers unvisited regions. At inference, GazeWorld generates a sequence of patch representations from the image alone without requiring real gaze data. Frozen GazeWorld features achieve state-of-the-art diagnostic accuracy across all nine supervised settings on CheXpert, RSNA Pneumonia, and SIIM-ACR Pneumothorax, as well as the highest zero-shot accuracy on all three benchmarks. On the GazeSearch benchmark, a generic decoder trained on the same frozen features outperforms the purpose-built LogitGaze-Med by over 16% in ScanMatch and 22% in SED, despite not being explicitly trained to predict gaze. GazeWorld demonstrates that modeling how experts read, not just what they conclude, offers a promising pretraining paradigm for medical imaging AI.

3D open-world environments with adversarial opponents remain a core challenge for reinforcement learning due to their vast state spaces. Effective reasoning representations are essential in such settings. While existing self-supervised visual foresight reasoning approaches often suffer from multi-step error accumulation, many recent studies resort to injecting domain-specific knowledge for more stable guidance. Our key insight is that the photorealistic fidelity of visual reasoning representations is secondary; what truly matters is providing informative, task-relevant signals. To this end, we propose ResDreamer, a hierarchical world model in which each higher-level layer is trained to reconstruct the residuals of the layer below. This design enables progressive abstraction of increasingly sophisticated world dynamics and fosters the emergence of richer latent representations. Drawing inspiration from the "Bitter Lesson", ResDreamer trains its reasoning representations in a purely self-supervised manner. The higher-level residual representations are used to modulate lower-level predictions, allowing the world model to scale effectively with only linearly increasing cross-layer communication costs. Experiments show that ResDreamer achieves state-of-the-art sample efficiency and parameter efficiency. This scalable hierarchical visual foresight reasoning architecture paves the way for more capable online RL agents in open-ended, dynamic environments. The code is accessible at https://github.com/XuYuanFei01/ResDreamer.

Executable world models can be read, edited, executed, and reused for planning, but only if the program captures the environment's transition law rather than semantic shortcuts in its surface vocabulary. We study online executable world-model learning under prior misalignment, where an agent must induce state-dependent dynamics from interaction evidence alone, without rule descriptions, reward signals, or trustworthy lexical priors. We introduce Alice, a closed-loop system that treats failed candidate updates as structural signal: when a candidate explains a new transition but loses previously explained ones, the preservation conflict reveals dynamics that the current program had conflated. Alice refines these conflicts into hypothesis classes that both provide compact, class-stratified preservation counterexamples for update and guide frontier exploration toward transitions that are novel and underrepresented with respect to the current program. We evaluate Alice on Baba in Wonderland, a prior-misaligned variant of Baba Is You that preserves simulator dynamics while replacing semantically meaningful rule-property labels with unrelated words. Experiments show that Alice substantially improves executable world-model learning under prior misalignment, and ablations show that both class refinement and class-aware exploration contribute.

Realistic surgical simulation plays a crucial role in training novice surgeons and in the development of autonomous agents. World models can scale such simulation environments to realistic and diverse procedures by predicting future patient states conditioned on current observations and surgical actions. However, current state-of-the-art approaches often fail to satisfy key criteria required for clinical applicability, including visual realism, physically grounded interactions, and the ability to simulate scenarios beyond the training distribution. Hence, we introduce SWoMo, a neuro-symbolic world model for cataract surgery simulation that decouples motion generation from visual realism. The symbolic component, consisting of a rule-based simulator and scene graph representations, models motion dynamics and tool-tissue interactions, while a diffusion model produces realistic visual appearance, including textures and tissue deformations. We propose an inverse pairing strategy that reconstructs real surgical videos in the simulator to obtain paired simulated and real videos, which are then used to train our video diffusion model for the reverse objective of sim-to-real translation. Our experiments show both qualitative and quantitative improvements over prior work. We demonstrate that our simulator further satisfies the key criteria, including generalisation to unseen interaction geometries, improvements in downstream phase detection, and unsupervised video style transfer. The code, data, and model weights are available at: https://ssharvienkumar.github.io/SWoMo/

Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions through closed-loop perception and action in 3D environments. We argue that aerial VLN can be formulated as a prediction-driven world-action problem: the agent should anticipate latent world evolution and act according to the predicted consequences. To this end, we propose WorldVLN, the first autoregressive world action model for aerial VLN. Unlike full-sequence video-generation world models that generate an entire visual clip, WorldVLN adapts a latent autoregressive video backbone to predict short-horizon world-state transitions and directly decodes them into executable waypoint actions. After each action segment is executed, newly received observations are encoded back into the autoregressive context, enabling closed-loop world-action prediction. We further introduce a two-stage training framework that first grounds the video prior in instruction-conditioned navigation dynamics and then develops Action-aware GRPO, the first reinforcement learning method tailored to autoregressive WAMs, to optimize waypoint decisions through their downstream rollout consequences. On public outdoor and indoor benchmarks, WorldVLN consistently outperforms existing Vision-Language-Action baselines with 12%+ success-rate gains and larger advantages on challenging cases. It further transfers zero-shot to real drone deployment, suggesting that the proposed WorldVLN offers a promising route for spatial action tasks. Demos and code are available at https://embodiedcity.github.io/WorldVLN/.

Humans abstract experiences into structured representations to facilitate pattern inference and knowledge transfer. While the hippocampal-entorhinal (HPC-MEC) circuit is known to represent both spatial and conceptual spaces, the mechanisms for concurrently extracting abstract structures from continuous, high-dimensional dynamics remain poorly understood. We propose a brain-inspired hierarchical model that simultaneously infers latent transitions and constructs a predictive visual world model. Our architecture employs an inverse model for structural extraction alongside an HPC-MEC coupling model that dissociates relational structures (MEC) from integrated episodic scenes (HPC). Using primitive transformation dynamics as a benchmark, we demonstrate the model's capacity for structural abstraction. By leveraging velocity-driven path integration, the framework enables robust prediction and structural reuse across diverse contexts, thereby achieving structural generalization. This work provides a novel computational framework for understanding how brain-inspired, self-supervised learning of world models facilitates the acquisition of reusable abstract knowledge.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable the learning of world models from unlabeled video by inferring abstract actions between consecutive frames. However, LAMs face a fundamental trade-off between action abstraction and generation fidelity. Existing methods typically circumvent this issue by using two-stage training with pre-trained world models or by limiting predictions to optical flow. In this paper, we introduce DiLA, a novel Disentangled Latent Action world model that aims to resolve this trade-off via content-structure disentanglement. Our key insight is that disentanglement and latent action learning are co-evolving: the predictive bottleneck inherent in latent action learning serves as a driving force for disentanglement, compelling the model to distill spatial layouts into the structure pathway while offloading visual details to a separate content pathway for generation. This synergy yields a continuous, semantically structured latent action space without compromising generative quality. DiLA achieves superior results in video generation quality, action transfer, visual planning, and manifold interpretability. These findings establish DiLA as a unified framework that simultaneously achieves high-level action abstraction and high-fidelity generation, advancing the frontier of self-supervised world model learning.

World models aim to improve robotic decision making by predicting the consequences of actions. However, in practice, their predictions often become unreliable once the robot encounters states outside the training distribution, limiting their effectiveness at deployment. We observe that execution itself provides a natural but underutilized signal: after each action, the robot directly observes the true next state, revealing the mismatch between predicted and actual outcomes. Building on this insight, we propose feedback world model, a new paradigm that closes the loop between prediction and observation at inference time. Instead of treating the world model as a static open-loop predictor, our method maintains a lightweight feedback state that is updated online to iteratively correct future predictions, compensating for model errors using real-time observations without additional training data or parameter updates. We show that this process can be interpreted as a latent-space observer and admits convergence guarantees under mild conditions. We further introduce action-aware guidance to better translate corrected predictions into control by emphasizing action-controllable components while suppressing irrelevant variations. Experiments on LIBERO-Plus, Robomimic, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method substantially improves both prediction accuracy and policy performance under distribution shift. In particular, it reduces world model prediction error by up to 76.4% and improves out-of-distribution (OOD) success rate by 30%. These results show that incorporating real-time feedback at inference time provides a simple yet powerful alternative to static world modeling.

Token-based transformer world models have shown strong performance in visual reinforcement learning, but often suffer from temporal inconsistency in long-horizon rollouts, including object duplication, disappearance, and transmutation. A key reason is that most existing approaches treat next-frame prediction purely as a token generation problem, without considering the persistence of tokens across time. We introduce Identifiable Token Correspondence (ITC), a decoding step for token-based transformer world models that formulates next-frame prediction as a structured assignment problem with latent token correspondence variables: each next-frame token is explained either by copying a token from the previous frame or by generating a new one. ITC leaves the transformer architecture and training procedure unchanged and can be added on top of existing backbones. Our experiments show state-of-the-art performance on 4 challenging benchmarks. The proposed method achieves a return of 72.5% and a score of 35.6% on the Craftax-classic benchmark, significantly surpassing the previous best of 67.4% and 27.9%. We release our source code on https://github.com/snu-mllab/Identifiable-Token-Correspondence.

Learning predictive world models from unlabelled video is a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. While Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) have set new benchmarks in semantic classification, they often remain physics-blind, failing to capture the causal dynamics necessary for downstream reasoning. We hypothesize that this stems from standard patch-based masking strategies, which prioritize visual texture over rare but informative kinematic events. We propose Interaction-Aware JEPA (IA-JEPA), which utilizes a self-supervised motion-centric masking strategy to prioritize physical interactions. By specifically targeting entities engaged in collisions or momentum transfers, we force the architecture to reconstruct latent trajectories rather than static background features. Evaluated on the CLEVRER benchmark, IA-JEPA achieves 14.26% accuracy on causal reasoning tasks, a significant lead over the 3.22% achieved by standard patch-masked baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate that IA-JEPA breaks the "static bias" of standard self-supervision by inducing a higher-entropy, more discriminative latent space (+10% entropy gain) that linearizes physical energy ($R^2=0.43$). We show that this interaction bias generalizes to real-world human actions (Something-Something V2) and zero-shot physical puzzles (PHYRE-Lite). Our results provide a scalable, fully self-supervised path toward building foundational world models that begin to internalize the causal structure of the physical world.

Physiological time series signals reflect complex, multi-scale dynamical processes of the human body. Existing modeling studies focus on static tasks such as classification, event forecasting, or short-horizon next step prediction, while long-horizon signal-level forecasting and predictive nature of physiological signals remain underexplored. We introduce NormWear-2, a world model that encodes both multivariate physiological signals and clinical intervention variables into a shared latent space and models their joint temporal evolution as a dynamical system. Our approach combines inference from prior pre-trained knowledge (intuition) with instant non-parametric latent state transition adaptation (insight), enabling coherent forecasting across multiple temporal scales, conditioned on heterogeneous clinical interventions. During the pretraining phase, we find that chaos-theoretic balancing of dynamical regime diversity yields more robust representations, with a smaller balanced corpus outperforming one twice its size and capturing bifurcation regimes. We evaluate the world model performance across diverse real-world physiological datasets spanning heterogeneous temporal resolutions and intervention regimes, covering daily life, point-of-care, and clinical settings, including fitness planning, hemodialysis, diabetes management, and surgical monitoring. These evaluation datasets comprise records from 8,026 subjects, spanning study durations from 3.2 hours for high-resolution signal data to 2.3 years for longitudinal clinical biomarker tracking. NormWear-2 achieves the best overall forecasting performance across time, frequency, and latent representation domains, with significant improvements over state-of-the-art time series foundation models, while maintaining competitive downstream representation quality, providing a step toward general-purpose world models for physiological signals.

Data scaling plays a pivotal role in the pursuit of general intelligence. However, the prevailing perception-planning paradigm in autonomous driving relies heavily on expensive manual annotations to supervise trajectory planning, which severely limits its scalability. Conversely, although existing perception-free driving world models achieve impressive driving performance, their real-world reasoning ability for planning is solely built on next frame image forecasting. Due to the lack of enough supervision, these models often struggle with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in unsatisfactory trajectory planning. In this paper, we propose EponaV2, a novel paradigm of driving world models, which achieves high-quality planning with comprehensive future reasoning. Inspired by how human drivers anticipate 3D geometry and semantics, we train our model to forecast more comprehensive future representations, which can be additionally decoded to future geometry and semantic maps. Extracting the 3D and semantic modalities enables our model to deeply understand the surrounding environment, and the future prediction task significantly enhances the real-world reasoning capabilities of EponaV2, ultimately leading to improved trajectory planning. Moreover, inspired by the training recipe of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a flow matching group relative policy optimization mechanism to further improve planning accuracy. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances of EponaV2 among perception-free models on three NAVSIM benchmarks (+1.3PDMS, +5.5EPDMS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

Whether navigating a building, operating a robot, or playing a game, an agent that acts effectively in an environment must first learn an internal model of how that environment works. Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a flexible modeling class for such internal world models, but learning them from observation-action trajectories alone is challenging and typically requires extensive environment interaction. We ask whether language-model priors can reduce costly interaction by leveraging prior knowledge, and introduce \emph{Pinductor} (POMDP-inductor): an LLM proposes candidate POMDP models from a few observation-action trajectories and iteratively refines them to optimize a belief-based likelihood score. Despite using strictly less information, \emph{Pinductor} matches the performance and sample efficiency of LLM-based POMDP learning methods that assume privileged access to the hidden state, while significantly surpassing the sample efficiency of tabular POMDP baselines. Further results show that performance scales with LLM capability and degrades gracefully as semantic information about the environment is withheld. Together, these results position language-model priors as a practical tool for sample-efficient world-model learning under partial observability, and a step toward generalist agents in real-world environments. Code is available at https://github.com/atomresearch/pinductor.

Diffusion world models have recently become competitive for online model-based reinforcement learning, but current approaches expose a tension: pixel diffusion is effective but computationally expensive while the latest latent diffusion approach improves efficiency yet performs subpar. The latter also relies on separately trained latents rather than the end-to-end world-model objectives that have driven much of modern MBRL progress. In particular, JEPA-style predictive representation learning has emerged as an especially promising direction for world modeling and MBRL. Concurrently, diffusion-style objectives have gained traction across multiple domains, with iterative refinement as a promising approach for multimodal and stochastic targets. Taken together, these trends motivate Joint Embedding DIffusion (JEDI), the first online end-to-end latent diffusion world model. JEDI learns its latent space directly from the diffusion denoising loss with a JEPA framework, using denoising to learn and predict future latents rather than relying on reconstruction and pretrained models. We provide a theoretical motivation showing that conventional JEPA objectives induce a predictive information bottleneck, and that conditional diffusion denoising admits a closely related predictive-compression decomposition. Empirically, JEDI is competitive on Atari100k and outperforms the baseline with seperately trained latents where directly comparable. Relative to the pixel diffusion baseline, JEDI uses 43% less VRAM, over 3$\times$ faster world-model sampling, and 2.5$\times$ faster training. JEDI also exhibits a markedly different task-level performance profile from the pixel baseline, suggesting that end-to-end predictive latents change more than compute alone.

Post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models via reinforcement learning (RL) in learned world models has emerged as an effective strategy to adapt to new tasks without costly real-world interactions. However, while using imagined trajectories reduces the sample complexity of policy training, existing methods still heavily rely on task-specific data to fine-tune both the world and reward models, fundamentally limiting their scalability to unseen tasks. To overcome this, we argue that world and reward models should capture transferable physical priors that enable zero-shot inference. We propose RAW-Dream (Reinforcing VLAs in task-Agnostic World Dreams), a new paradigm that completely disentangles world model learning from downstream task dependencies. RAW-Dream utilizes a world model pre-trained on diverse task-free behaviors for predicting future rollouts, and an off-the-shelf Vision-Language Model (VLM) for reward generation. Because both components are task-agnostic, VLAs can be readily finetuned for any new task entirely within this zero-shot imagination. Furthermore, to mitigate world model hallucinations, we introduce a dual-noise verification mechanism to filter out unreliable rollouts. Extensive experiments across simulation and real-world settings demonstrate consistent performance gains, proving that generalized physical priors can effectively substitute for costly task-dependent data, offering a highly scalable roadmap for VLA adaptation.

When people share the same documents and observations yet reach different conclusions, the disagreement often shifts into a judgment that the other party is cognitively defective, irrational, or acting in bad faith. This paper argues that such divergence is better described as a form of non-identifiability inherent in inference and learning, rather than as a defect of the other party. We organize the phenomenon into two levels: (i) $θ$-level non-identifiability, where conclusions diverge under the same world model $W$ because inference settings differ; and (ii) $W$-level non-identifiability, where repeated use of an inference setting $θ$ biases data exposure and update rules, causing the learned world model $W$ itself to diverge. We introduce an inference profile $θ= (R, E, S, D)$, consisting of Reference, Exploration, Stabilization, and Horizon, and show how outputs can split even for the same observation $o$ and the same $W$. We further explain why disagreements tend to project onto a small number of bases -- abstract versus concrete, externalizability, and order versus freedom -- as a consequence of general constraints on learning systems: computational, observational, and coordination constraints. Finally, we relate the framework to deep representation learning, including representation hierarchy, latent-state estimation, and regularization-exploration trade-offs, and illustrate the framework through a case study on AI regulation debates.

World models aim to predict plausible futures consistent with past observations, a capability central to planning and decision-making in reinforcement learning. Yet, existing architectures face a fundamental memory trade-off: transformers preserve local detail but are bottlenecked by quadratic attention, while recurrent and state-space models scale more efficiently but compress history at the cost of fidelity. To overcome this trade-off, we suggest decoupling future-past consistency from any single architecture and instead leveraging a set of specialized experts. We introduce a diffusion-based framework that integrates heterogeneous memory models through a contrastive product-of-experts formulation. Our approach instantiates three complementary roles: a short-term memory expert that captures fine local dynamics, a long-term memory expert that stores episodic history in external diffusion weights via lightweight test-time finetuning, and a spatial long-term memory expert that enforces geometric and spatial coherence. This compositional design avoids mode collapse and scales to long contexts without incurring a quadratic cost. Across simulated and real-world benchmarks, our method improves temporal consistency, recall of past observations, and navigation performance, establishing a novel paradigm for building and operating memory-augmented diffusion world models.

Closed-loop driving simulation requires real-time interaction beyond short offline clips, pushing current driving world models toward autoregressive (AR) rollout. Existing AR distillation approaches typically rely on frame sinks or student-side degradation training. The former transfers poorly to driving due to fast ego-motion and rapid scene changes, while the latter remains bounded by the teacher's single-pass output length and thus provides only a limited supervision horizon. A natural question is: can the teacher itself be extended via AR rollout to provide unbounded-horizon supervision at bounded memory cost? The key difficulty is that a standard teacher drifts under its own predictions, contaminating the supervision it provides. Our key insight is to make the teacher rollout-capable, ensuring reliable supervision from its own AR rollouts. This is instantiated as HorizonDrive, an anti-drifting training-and-distillation framework for AR driving simulation. First, scheduled rollout recovery (SRR) trains the base model to reconstruct ground-truth future clips from prediction-corrupted histories, yielding a teacher that remains stable across long AR rollouts. Second, the rollout-capable teacher is extended via AR rollout, providing long-horizon distribution-matching supervision under bounded memory, while a short-window student aligns to it with teacher rollout DMD (TRD) for efficient real-time deployment. HorizonDrive natively supports minute-scale AR rollout under bounded memory; on nuScenes, HorizonDrive reduces FID by 52% and FVD by 37%, and lowers ARE and DTW by 21% and 9% relative to the strongest long-horizon streaming baselines, while remaining competitive with single-pass driving video generators.

Modern action-conditioned video world models achieve strong short-horizon visual realism, yet remain unreliable on rare, interaction-critical transitions that dominate downstream planning and policy performance. Because passive demonstration data systematically under-samples these high-impact regimes, improving robustness requires actively eliciting model failures rather than relying on their natural occurrence. We introduce a KL-constrained adversarial curriculum in which a policy is trained to expose high-error trajectories of a diffusion-based world model while remaining close to the behavior distribution. The world model is continuously fine-tuned on these adversarially discovered trajectories, yielding an adversarial training loop that converts rare failures into a stable, near-distribution training signal without drifting into out-of-distribution exploitation. To maintain pressure on unresolved weaknesses as the model improves, we propose a Prioritized Adversarial Trajectory (PAT) buffer that re-ranks trajectories based on prediction error, action fidelity, and learning progress, focusing training on unresolved failure modes rather than repeatedly revisiting solved cases. We implement our approach in the MineRL framework and evaluate it on held-out out-of-distribution trajectories; PROWL improves robustness over models trained on passive data alone, reveals reward-hacking behaviors under weak behavioral constraints, and demonstrates that effective adversarial world-model training critically depends on balancing exploratory failure discovery with explicit behavioral regularization. Our results suggest that scalable world models benefit not only from larger datasets, but also from selectively generating informative training data.

End-to-end autonomous driving systems are increasingly integrating Vision-Language Model (VLM) architectures, incorporating text reasoning or visual reasoning to enhance the robustness and accuracy of driving decisions. However, the reasoning mechanisms employed in most methods are direct adaptations from general domains, lacking in-depth exploration tailored to autonomous driving scenarios, particularly within visual reasoning modules. In this paper, we propose a driving world model that performs parallel prediction of latent semantic features for consecutive future frames in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, thereby enabling long-horizon modeling of future world states. We also introduce an efficient and adaptive text reasoning mechanism that utilizes additional social knowledge and reasoning capabilities to further improve driving performance in challenging long-tail scenarios. We present a novel, efficient, and effective approach that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the closed-loop Bench2drive benchmark. Codes are available at: https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/DeepSight.

Recent advances in vision-language models have enabled mobile GUI agents to perceive visual interfaces and execute user instructions, but reliable prediction of action consequences remains critical for long-horizon and high-risk interactions. Existing mobile world models provide either text-based or image-based future states, yet it remains unclear which representation is useful, whether generated rollouts can replace real environments, and how test-time guidance helps agents of different strengths. To answer the above questions, we filter and annotate mobile world-model data, then train world models across four modalities: delta text, full text, diffusion-based images, and renderable code. These models achieve SoTA performance on both MobileWorldBench and Code2WorldBench. Furthermore, by evaluating their downstream utility on AITZ, AndroidControl, and AndroidWorld, we obtain three findings. First, renderable code reconstruction achieves high in-distribution fidelity and provides effective multimodal supervision for data construction, while text-based feedback is more robust for online out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. Second, world-model-generated trajectories can provide transferable interaction experience in the training process and improve agents' end-to-end task performance, although these data do not preserve the original distribution. Last, for overconfident mobile agents with low action entropy, posterior self-reflection provides limited gains, suggesting that world models are more effective as prior perception or training supervision than as universal post-hoc verifiers.

Yes. We find that large multimodal models develop mental imagery when solving spatial puzzles, and they do imagine sheep when solving sheep puzzles. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5 VLM to solve twelve diverse visual reasoning tasks -- including tangram, jigsaw, sokoban, 3D mental rotation, and rush hour -- that require understanding geometry, spatial relationships, and the consequences of actions. By supervising the model to predict the open-loop sequence of actions to solve a puzzle from an initial state, we show that the model's activations after each action encode meaningful visual information about the intermediate state. This finding suggests that an imperfect visual world model begins to form as a byproduct of learning to select correct actions, in the absence of any explicit visual supervision. Building on this observation, we propose two ways to sharpen and use the mental images formed by the model. We find that integrating as few as sixteen visual tokens per step into the chain of thought improves the average solve rate from 83% to 89%, with particularly strong gains on reasoning-heavy tasks such as jigsaw and 3D mental rotation.

World models for deformable objects should recover not only geometry and appearance, but also underlying physical dynamics, interaction grounding, and material behavior. Learning such a model from real videos is challenging because deformable linear, planar, and volumetric objects evolve under high-dimensional deformation, noisy interactions, and complex material response. The model must therefore infer a physical state from visual observations, roll it forward under new interactions, and render the resulting dynamics with high visual fidelity. We present DeformMaster, a video-derived interactive physics-neural world model that turns real interaction videos into an online interactive model of deformable objects within a unified dynamics-and-appearance framework. DeformMaster preserves structured physical rollout while using a neural residual to compensate for unmodeled effects, grounds sparse hand motion as distributed compliant actuator for hand-continuum interaction, represents material response with spatially varying constitutive experts, and drives high-fidelity 4D appearance from the predicted physical evolution. Experiments on real-world deformable-object sequences demonstrate DeformMaster's ability to roll out future dynamics and render dynamic appearance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while supporting novel action rollout, material-parameter variation, and dynamic novel-view synthesis. Project page: https://can-lee.github.io/deformmaster-web/

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a simpleframework for learning world models by predicting future latent representations.However, JEPA training is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff.Without sufficient structural constraints, excessive representationalvariance causes the model to collapse to trivial solutions.The recent LeWorldModel (LeWM) shows that this issue can be alleviated bysimply constraining latent embeddings with an isotropic Gaussian prior.However, latent representations inherently lie on low-dimensional manifoldswithin a high-dimensional ambient space, and enforcing an isotropic Gaussianprior directly in this ambient space introduces an overly strong bias.In this work, we propose ame, which seeks a favorable operatingpoint on the bias-variance frontier by applying Gaussian constraints inmultiple random subspaces rather than in the originalembedding space.This design relaxes the global constraint while preserving itsanti-collapse effect, leading to a better balance between trainingstability and representation flexibility.Extensive experiments across fourcontinuous-control environments demonstrate that consistentlyoutperforms LeWM with very clear margins.Our method is simple yet effective, and serves as a strong baseline for future JEPA-based world model research.fdefinedeeemodeThe code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/Sub-JEPA.