English

Factored Latent Action World Models

Machine Learning 2026-05-26 v2

Abstract

Learning latent actions from action-free video has emerged as a powerful paradigm for scaling up controllable world model learning. Latent actions provide a natural interface for users to iteratively generate and manipulate videos. However, most existing approaches rely on monolithic inverse and forward dynamics models that learn a single latent action to control the entire scene, and therefore struggle in complex environments where multiple entities act simultaneously. This paper introduces Factored Latent Action Model (FLAM), a factored dynamics framework that decomposes the scene into independent factors, each inferring its own latent action and predicting its own next-step factor value. This factorized structure enables more accurate modeling of complex multi-entity dynamics and improves video generation quality in action-free video settings compared to monolithic models. Based on experiments on both simulation and real-world multi-entity datasets, we find that FLAM outperforms prior work in prediction accuracy and representation quality, and facilitates downstream policy learning, demonstrating the benefits of factorized latent action models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.16229,
  title  = {Factored Latent Action World Models},
  author = {Zizhao Wang and Chang Shi and Jiaheng Hu and Kevin Rohling and Roberto Martín-Martín and Amy Zhang and Peter Stone},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.16229},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:40:55.187Z