When do World Models Successfully Learn Dynamical Systems?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ross, Edmund, Drygala, Claudia, Schwarz, Leonhard, Kaiser, Samir, di Mare, Francesca, Breiten, Tobias, Gottschalk, Hanno
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Ross, Edmund
Drygala, Claudia
Schwarz, Leonhard
Kaiser, Samir
di Mare, Francesca
Breiten, Tobias
Gottschalk, Hanno
author_facet Ross, Edmund
Drygala, Claudia
Schwarz, Leonhard
Kaiser, Samir
di Mare, Francesca
Breiten, Tobias
Gottschalk, Hanno
contents In this work, we explore the use of compact latent representations with learned time dynamics ('World Models') to simulate physical systems. Drawing on concepts from control theory, we propose a theoretical framework that explains why projecting time slices into a low-dimensional space and then concatenating to form a history ('Tokenization') is so effective at learning physics datasets, and characterise when exactly the underlying dynamics admit a reconstruction mapping from the history of previous tokenized frames to the next. To validate these claims, we develop a sequence of models with increasing complexity, starting with least-squares regression and progressing through simple linear layers, shallow adversarial learners, and ultimately full-scale generative adversarial networks (GANs). We evaluate these models on a variety of datasets, including modified forms of the heat and wave equations, the chaotic regime 2D Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, and a challenging computational fluid dynamics (CFD) dataset of a 2D Kármán vortex street around a fixed cylinder, where our model is successfully able to recreate the flow.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When do World Models Successfully Learn Dynamical Systems?
Ross, Edmund
Drygala, Claudia
Schwarz, Leonhard
Kaiser, Samir
di Mare, Francesca
Breiten, Tobias
Gottschalk, Hanno
Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
In this work, we explore the use of compact latent representations with learned time dynamics ('World Models') to simulate physical systems. Drawing on concepts from control theory, we propose a theoretical framework that explains why projecting time slices into a low-dimensional space and then concatenating to form a history ('Tokenization') is so effective at learning physics datasets, and characterise when exactly the underlying dynamics admit a reconstruction mapping from the history of previous tokenized frames to the next. To validate these claims, we develop a sequence of models with increasing complexity, starting with least-squares regression and progressing through simple linear layers, shallow adversarial learners, and ultimately full-scale generative adversarial networks (GANs). We evaluate these models on a variety of datasets, including modified forms of the heat and wave equations, the chaotic regime 2D Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, and a challenging computational fluid dynamics (CFD) dataset of a 2D Kármán vortex street around a fixed cylinder, where our model is successfully able to recreate the flow.
title When do World Models Successfully Learn Dynamical Systems?
topic Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04898