World models

Timeline

1. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
   Persistent Planar Memory for Video World Models
   We present PPMem, a video world model that adopts plane primitives as its persistent 3D memory.
2. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   Beyond Large Language Models: A Mental World Model Framework for Mental Modeling, Simulation, Evolution, and Interpretability
   This paper introduces the Mental World Model (MWM) and its implementation, the Multi-Branch Mental Evolution Architecture (MMEA), which explicitly constructs subjective worlds, models interactions between cognition and mental states, and simulates continuous mental evolution shaped by historical experiences.
3. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   Beyond Action Prediction: Learning Search-Free Planning in Latent Space
   Latent world models learn action-conditioned state transitions in a compact representation space, providing a predictive model for visual planning and control.
4. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
   Execution Before Memory: Diagnosing Memory Failures in Video World Models
   A memory test for a video world model should say whether the scene was set, whether the asked change was carried out, and whether the last frame shows the result.
5. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   Momentum: Persistent Dynamics for Video World Models
   We introduce Momentum, a two-stage pipeline: WorldUpdate jointly generates reference-camera videos as a shared memory of scene dynamics, and WorldInteract grounds camera-controlled video generation in this evolving memory, allowing moving content to remain represented outside the target view and reappear consistently.
6. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   LithoWorld: An Endpoint World Model for Lithography Process-Window Recovery
   We present LithoWorld, an endpoint world model for SEM-guided parameter recovery.
7. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   AWAM: Active Trajectory-Conditioned View Imagination for Robust Robot Manipulation
   To address this perceptual gap, a virtual active-perception paradigm is introduced.
8. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   Language Models Learn to Improve Language Models
   Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate AI research, including language-model (LM) development, offering a potential path toward recursive self-improvement.
9. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
   ORD-WM: Learning Object-Centric Rigid Dynamics for 3D World Modeling in Robotic Manipulation
   To address this, we propose ORD-WM, a 3D world model that learns object-centric rigid dynamics for robotic manipulation.
10. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    BeJEPA: A Goal-Conditioned Humanoid Behavior World Model via Unsupervised RL
    We introduce BeJEPA, a goal-conditioned Behavior World Model learned through unsupervised reinforcement learning from human motion priors and robot interaction.
11. Oct 16, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    World Action Critic (WAC) Model: Joint Foresight and Criticism for Policy Learning
    To address these challenges, we propose the World Action Critic (WAC) Model, which proposes multimodal action candidates and jointly learns candidate-conditioned future prediction and consequence evaluation.
12. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
    GlobeBench: Evaluating Text-Based World Model Capabilities for Scalable Environment Simulations
    Text-based world models have recently shown potential to simulate complex RL environment state transitions for a diverse set of use cases.
13. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Is a Linear Probe Evidence of a Linear Representation?
    The linear representation hypothesis holds that pretrained vision models encode generative factors as linearly decodable directions in feature space, and comes with a standard methodology: train a linear probe, declare a factor represented if accuracy is high.
14. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    T2-z: Test-Time Optimization of Environment Latents for Robotic World Models
    We introduce T2-Z for test-time optimization of environment latents, which augments a robotic world model with a learnable environment latent to condition world predictions.
15. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
    GeoState: Learning View-Decoupled Geometry States for 3D World Modeling
    We propose GeoState, a view-decoupled geometry representation for predictive 3D world modeling that separates scene-state evolution from camera-dependent observation.
16. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Dexterity from Supervised Play
    We present DSP: Dexterity from supervised play, a framework in which a robot learns a play policy from minutes of human play through behavior cloning, then deploys it autonomously to collect hours of interaction data to train a world model.
17. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
    Velox: Spatial Memory Makes World Models Efficient
    To address this bottleneck, we introduce Velox, a training-free attention router for region-level context selection using frustum slab correspondences from streaming geometry.
18. Oct 15, 2026 · Model release · 2 sources
    Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics
    Gemini 4 Argon marks a step change in physical understanding, code generation, and visual-semantic reasoning—unlocking new workflows across the robotics stack and accelerating progress toward physical AGI.
19. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Plans Are Not Executions: Adapting Frozen World-Model Planners to Controller-Induced Execution Shift
    We introduce ExecutionBridge, which infers controller-specific execution characteristics from planned-executed trajectory pairs and uses them to adapt the native ego latent rollout while keeping the original planned trajectory unchanged.
20. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    VeriVLA: Adaptive Test-Time Verification for Flow-Based VLAs with Latent World Models
    Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are inherently stochastic: different noise seeds can produce action chunks of varying quality from the same observation.
21. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    TS-WAM: Temporal Latent Actions and World-Action Coupling for Vision-Language Robot Control
    Many vision-language-action policies rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations and lack an explicit mechanism for predicting future visual states.
22. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
    CoWorld Reasoner: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with the Evolving Video World Model-Driven Harness
    To support flexible visual imagination for diverse reasoning tasks, we introduce CoWorld Reasoner, an agentic framework that uses a VWM as a unified visual reasoning engine.
23. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    MAIA: Anticipating Interaction Anomalies in Contact-Rich Manipulation via Multimodal World Models
    To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce CRIA, a real-world multimodal dataset of 2,852 trajectories spanning 18 contact-rich manipulation tasks, with frame-level annotations of anomaly onset and evolution.
24. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Learning Intrinsic Dynamics in Latent World Models
    Learning intrinsic dynamics---the relationship between actions and their consequences---is essential for world models.
25. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    From Optical Flow to Safety: Visual Safety Certification via Scale-Free Relative Motion
    This letter introduces a visual safety-certification paradigm that uses scale-free, depth-normalized relative motion encoded by monocular optical flow as the representation for collision-risk certification, without reconstructing obstacle position, velocity, geometry, or a metric world model.
26. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Constrained Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Imagination
    Predicting cost in a multi-agent world model moves most constrained policy updates into imagination: the stronger model-free baseline needs $10$ to $20$ times CA-MAMBA's interactions on the median SMAC configuration, and CA-MAMBA earns $2.8$ to $12$ times the baselines' MAMuJoCo reward at equal budget.
27. Oct 15, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Mallea: Building, Steering, and Memorizing Worlds with Coding Agent
    We present Mallea, a system for building, steering, and memorizing worlds from text.
28. Oct 14, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    Sign Betting for Misspecified Regression: Variance Adaptivity and Optimal Approximation
    We study bounded regression under model misspecification, evaluating a function $f$ by its $L1(PX)$ distance to the conditional mean $η(x)=\mathbb{E}[Y\mid X=x]$, rather than the standard $L2(PX)$.
29. Oct 14, 2026 · Research paper · 1 source
    When Reality Outpaces Cognition: A New Scaling Principle for Reliable Intelligence
    This paper challenges the understanding capabilities of existing AI paradigms and emerging world models by asking a fundamental question: How quickly can reality change before an intelligent system can no longer reliably perceive, reason, and act?
30. Oct 14, 2026 · Research paper · 2 sources
    SafeDriveVLA: Navigation-Conditioned World Model Dreaming for Conflict-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving
    We propose SafeDriveVLA, the first driving VLA that (1) explicitly predicts a three-level navigation-compliance mode to decouple conflict reasoning from action generation, and (2) uses navigation-conditioned world model dreaming to inform this prediction.

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