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Main Authors: Wang, Zizhao, Wang, Kaixin, Zhao, Li, Stone, Peter, Bian, Jiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03298
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author Wang, Zizhao
Wang, Kaixin
Zhao, Li
Stone, Peter
Bian, Jiang
author_facet Wang, Zizhao
Wang, Kaixin
Zhao, Li
Stone, Peter
Bian, Jiang
contents World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on object-centric rather than monolithic representations, with the goal of more effectively capturing environment dynamics and enhancing compositional generalization. However, the development of object-centric world models has largely been explored in environments with limited visual complexity (such as basic geometries). It remains underexplored whether such models can generalize to more complex settings with diverse textures and cluttered scenes. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing Dyn-O, an enhanced structured world model built upon object-centric representations. Compared to prior work in object-centric representations, Dyn-O improves in both learning representations and modeling dynamics. On the challenging Procgen games, we find that our method can learn object-centric world models directly from pixel observations, outperforming DreamerV3 in rollout prediction accuracy. Furthermore, by decoupling object-centric features into dynamics-agnostic and dynamics-aware components, we enable finer-grained manipulation of these features and generate more diverse imagined trajectories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03298
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations
Wang, Zizhao
Wang, Kaixin
Zhao, Li
Stone, Peter
Bian, Jiang
Machine Learning
World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on object-centric rather than monolithic representations, with the goal of more effectively capturing environment dynamics and enhancing compositional generalization. However, the development of object-centric world models has largely been explored in environments with limited visual complexity (such as basic geometries). It remains underexplored whether such models can generalize to more complex settings with diverse textures and cluttered scenes. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing Dyn-O, an enhanced structured world model built upon object-centric representations. Compared to prior work in object-centric representations, Dyn-O improves in both learning representations and modeling dynamics. On the challenging Procgen games, we find that our method can learn object-centric world models directly from pixel observations, outperforming DreamerV3 in rollout prediction accuracy. Furthermore, by decoupling object-centric features into dynamics-agnostic and dynamics-aware components, we enable finer-grained manipulation of these features and generate more diverse imagined trajectories.
title Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03298