English
Related papers

Related papers: Causal World Models by Unsupervised Deconfounding …

200 papers

When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. In reality, what appears as a drifting causal mechanism is often the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zhiyu Zhao , Haoxuan Li , Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Francesco Faccio , Jürgen Schmidhuber , Mengyue Yang

Generating explanations for reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging as actions may produce long-term effects on the future. In this paper, we develop a novel framework for explainable RL by learning a causal world model without prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Zhongwei Yu , Jingqing Ruan , Dengpeng Xing

Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping…

This work highlights that video world modeling, alongside vision-language pre-training, establishes a fresh and independent foundation for robot learning. Intuitively, video world models provide the ability to imagine the near future by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Lin Li , Qihang Zhang , Yiming Luo , Shuai Yang , Ruilin Wang , Fei Han , Mingrui Yu , Zelin Gao , Nan Xue , Xing Zhu , Yujun Shen , Yinghao Xu

World models enable agents to plan by imagining future states, but existing approaches operate from a single viewpoint, typically egocentric, even when other perspectives would make planning easier; navigation, for instance, benefits from a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Rishabh Sharma , Gijs Hogervorst , Wayne E. Mackey , David J. Heeger , Stefano Martiniani

In model-based learning, the agent learns behaviors by simulating trajectories based on world model predictions. Standard world models typically learn a stationary transition function that maps states and actions to next states, when an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qinshi Zhang , Weipeng Deng , Zhihan Jiang , Jiaming Qu , Qianren Li , Weitao Xu , Ray LC

World models enable agents to predict future dynamics conditioned on actions, making the choice of latent representation central to planning and control. Such representations are often either learned directly from pixels with limited…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Minghao Fu , Fan Feng , Nicklas Hansen , Biwei Huang

The rapid progress in embodied artificial intelligence has highlighted the necessity for more advanced and integrated models that can perceive, interpret, and predict environmental dynamics. In this context, World Models (WMs) have been…

A structured understanding of our world in terms of objects, relations, and hierarchies is an important component of human cognition. Learning such a structured world model from raw sensory data remains a challenge. As a step towards this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-07 Thomas Kipf , Elise van der Pol , Max Welling

Being able to reason about how one's behaviour can affect the behaviour of others is a core skill required of intelligent driving agents. Despite this, the state of the art struggles to meet the need of agents to discover causal links…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Rhys Howard , Lars Kunze

Causal discovery is at the core of human cognition. It enables us to reason about the environment and make counterfactual predictions about unseen scenarios that can vastly differ from our previous experiences. We consider the task of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Yunzhu Li , Antonio Torralba , Animashree Anandkumar , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg

Navigation is a fundamental skill of agents with visual-motor capabilities. We introduce a Navigation World Model (NWM), a controllable video generation model that predicts future visual observations based on past observations and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Amir Bar , Gaoyue Zhou , Danny Tran , Trevor Darrell , Yann LeCun

The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, remains challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Gaoyue Zhou , Hengkai Pan , Yann LeCun , Lerrel Pinto

We introduce Language World Models, a class of language-conditional generative model which interpret natural language messages by predicting latent codes of future observations. This provides a visual grounding of the message, similar to an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers , Jason Naradowsky

Causal asymmetry is one of the great surprises in predictive modelling: the memory required to predict the future differs from the memory required to retrodict the past. There is a privileged temporal direction for modelling a stochastic…

Research in Cognitive Science suggests that humans understand and represent knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In addition to observations, they can rely on experimenting and counterfactual reasoning -- i.e. referring to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Kanvaly Fadiga , Etienne Houzé , Ada Diaconescu , Jean-Louis Dessalles

Differentiable simulators represent an environment's dynamics as a differentiable function. Within robotics and autonomous driving, this property is used in Analytic Policy Gradients (APG), which relies on backpropagating through the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Asen Nachkov , Danda Pani Paudel , Jan-Nico Zaech , Davide Scaramuzza , Luc Van Gool

Efficiently navigating complex environments requires agents to internalize the underlying logic of their world, yet standard world modelling methods often struggle with sample inefficiency, lack of transparency, and poor scalability. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Enrique Crespo-Fernandez , Oliver Ray , Telmo de Menezes e Silva Filho , Peter Flach

Modern deep learning models excel at pattern recognition but remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization and a demand for massive datasets. We argue that a key ingredient for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Mohamed Zayaan S

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to operate in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments, performing tasks such as manipulation, navigation, and decision-making. Achieving these capabilities requires agents to understand the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Peng-Fei Zhang , Ying Cheng , Xiaofan Sun , Shijie Wang , Fengling Li , Lei Zhu , Heng Tao Shen