English

Learning Massively Multitask World Models for Continuous Control

Machine Learning 2025-12-03 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Robotics

Abstract

General-purpose control demands agents that act across many tasks and embodiments, yet research on reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control remains dominated by single-task or offline regimes, reinforcing a view that online RL does not scale. Inspired by the foundation model recipe (large-scale pretraining followed by light RL) we ask whether a single agent can be trained on hundreds of tasks with online interaction. To accelerate research in this direction, we introduce a new benchmark with 200 diverse tasks spanning many domains and embodiments, each with language instructions, demonstrations, and optionally image observations. We then present \emph{Newt}, a language-conditioned multitask world model that is first pretrained on demonstrations to acquire task-aware representations and action priors, and then jointly optimized with online interaction across all tasks. Experiments show that Newt yields better multitask performance and data-efficiency than a set of strong baselines, exhibits strong open-loop control, and enables rapid adaptation to unseen tasks. We release our environments, demonstrations, code for training and evaluation, as well as 200+ checkpoints.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.19584,
  title  = {Learning Massively Multitask World Models for Continuous Control},
  author = {Nicklas Hansen and Hao Su and Xiaolong Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19584},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Webpage: https://www.nicklashansen.com/NewtWM

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:52:58.948Z