Understanding the limits of latent world models

World models are widely proposed as core components for enabling agents to reason over long temporal and spatial horizons. Yet current evaluations often emphasize task performance while providing limited insight into whether learned world models acquire predictive latent dynamics that reflect the underlying structure of the environment. Here we introduce the concept of faithful latent world models as an equivariance condition between the environment's transition map and the learned latent dynamics. We propose latent rollout consistency (LRC) as a metric to evaluate action-conditioned latent prediction. Strikingly, we find that across the studied state of the art latent world models, none solves the task by actually faithfully modeling the dynamics of the environment.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.37588
Primary Topic
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Type
preprint
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preprint

Understanding the limits of latent world models

Rodrigo González Laiz, Steffen Schneider
arXiv (Cornell University)
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
preprint

Understanding the limits of latent world models

Rodrigo González Laiz, Steffen Schneider
preprint en

Abstract

World models are widely proposed as core components for enabling agents to reason over long temporal and spatial horizons. Yet current evaluations often emphasize task performance while providing limited insight into whether learned world models acquire predictive latent dynamics that reflect the underlying structure of the environment. Here we introduce the concept of faithful latent world models as an equivariance condition between the environment's transition map and the learned latent dynamics. We propose latent rollout consistency (LRC) as a metric to evaluate action-conditioned latent prediction. Strikingly, we find that across the studied state of the art latent world models, none solves the task by actually faithfully modeling the dynamics of the environment.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
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