FOUNDER: Grounding Foundation Models in World Models for Open-Ended Embodied Decision Making

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yucen, Yu, Rui, Wan, Shenghua, Gan, Le, Zhan, De-Chuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866918095533113344
author Wang, Yucen
Yu, Rui
Wan, Shenghua
Gan, Le
Zhan, De-Chuan
author_facet Wang, Yucen
Yu, Rui
Wan, Shenghua
Gan, Le
Zhan, De-Chuan
contents Foundation Models (FMs) and World Models (WMs) offer complementary strengths in task generalization at different levels. In this work, we propose FOUNDER, a framework that integrates the generalizable knowledge embedded in FMs with the dynamic modeling capabilities of WMs to enable open-ended task solving in embodied environments in a reward-free manner. We learn a mapping function that grounds FM representations in the WM state space, effectively inferring the agent's physical states in the world simulator from external observations. This mapping enables the learning of a goal-conditioned policy through imagination during behavior learning, with the mapped task serving as the goal state. Our method leverages the predicted temporal distance to the goal state as an informative reward signal. FOUNDER demonstrates superior performance on various multi-task offline visual control benchmarks, excelling in capturing the deep-level semantics of tasks specified by text or videos, particularly in scenarios involving complex observations or domain gaps where prior methods struggle. The consistency of our learned reward function with the ground-truth reward is also empirically validated. Our project website is https://sites.google.com/view/founder-rl.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12496
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FOUNDER: Grounding Foundation Models in World Models for Open-Ended Embodied Decision Making
Wang, Yucen
Yu, Rui
Wan, Shenghua
Gan, Le
Zhan, De-Chuan
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Foundation Models (FMs) and World Models (WMs) offer complementary strengths in task generalization at different levels. In this work, we propose FOUNDER, a framework that integrates the generalizable knowledge embedded in FMs with the dynamic modeling capabilities of WMs to enable open-ended task solving in embodied environments in a reward-free manner. We learn a mapping function that grounds FM representations in the WM state space, effectively inferring the agent's physical states in the world simulator from external observations. This mapping enables the learning of a goal-conditioned policy through imagination during behavior learning, with the mapped task serving as the goal state. Our method leverages the predicted temporal distance to the goal state as an informative reward signal. FOUNDER demonstrates superior performance on various multi-task offline visual control benchmarks, excelling in capturing the deep-level semantics of tasks specified by text or videos, particularly in scenarios involving complex observations or domain gaps where prior methods struggle. The consistency of our learned reward function with the ground-truth reward is also empirically validated. Our project website is https://sites.google.com/view/founder-rl.
title FOUNDER: Grounding Foundation Models in World Models for Open-Ended Embodied Decision Making
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12496