Semantic World Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Berg, Jacob, Zhu, Chuning, Bao, Yanda, Durugkar, Ishan, Gupta, Abhishek
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Berg, Jacob
Zhu, Chuning
Bao, Yanda
Durugkar, Ishan
Gupta, Abhishek
author_facet Berg, Jacob
Zhu, Chuning
Bao, Yanda
Durugkar, Ishan
Gupta, Abhishek
contents Planning with world models offers a powerful paradigm for robotic control. Conventional approaches train a model to predict future frames conditioned on current frames and actions, which can then be used for planning. However, the objective of predicting future pixels is often at odds with the actual planning objective; strong pixel reconstruction does not always correlate with good planning decisions. This paper posits that instead of reconstructing future frames as pixels, world models only need to predict task-relevant semantic information about the future. For such prediction the paper poses world modeling as a visual question answering problem about semantic information in future frames. This perspective allows world modeling to be approached with the same tools underlying vision language models. Thus vision language models can be trained as "semantic" world models through a supervised finetuning process on image-action-text data, enabling planning for decision-making while inheriting many of the generalization and robustness properties from the pretrained vision-language models. The paper demonstrates how such a semantic world model can be used for policy improvement on open-ended robotics tasks, leading to significant generalization improvements over typical paradigms of reconstruction-based action-conditional world modeling. Website available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/swm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19818
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic World Models
Berg, Jacob
Zhu, Chuning
Bao, Yanda
Durugkar, Ishan
Gupta, Abhishek
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Planning with world models offers a powerful paradigm for robotic control. Conventional approaches train a model to predict future frames conditioned on current frames and actions, which can then be used for planning. However, the objective of predicting future pixels is often at odds with the actual planning objective; strong pixel reconstruction does not always correlate with good planning decisions. This paper posits that instead of reconstructing future frames as pixels, world models only need to predict task-relevant semantic information about the future. For such prediction the paper poses world modeling as a visual question answering problem about semantic information in future frames. This perspective allows world modeling to be approached with the same tools underlying vision language models. Thus vision language models can be trained as "semantic" world models through a supervised finetuning process on image-action-text data, enabling planning for decision-making while inheriting many of the generalization and robustness properties from the pretrained vision-language models. The paper demonstrates how such a semantic world model can be used for policy improvement on open-ended robotics tasks, leading to significant generalization improvements over typical paradigms of reconstruction-based action-conditional world modeling. Website available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/swm.
title Semantic World Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19818