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Main Authors: Jiang, Guangfeng, Luo, Yueru, Liu, Jun, Huang, Yi, Zhu, Yiyao, Qu, Zhan, Chen, Dave Zhenyu, Liu, Bingbing, Yan, Xu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20095
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author Jiang, Guangfeng
Luo, Yueru
Liu, Jun
Huang, Yi
Zhu, Yiyao
Qu, Zhan
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
Liu, Bingbing
Yan, Xu
author_facet Jiang, Guangfeng
Luo, Yueru
Liu, Jun
Huang, Yi
Zhu, Yiyao
Qu, Zhan
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
Liu, Bingbing
Yan, Xu
contents Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in world models, which primarily aim to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between an agent's actions and the evolving environment. However, existing approaches often suffer from tight runtime coupling or depend on offline reward signals, resulting in substantial inference overhead or hindering end-to-end optimization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WPT, a World-to-Policy Transfer training paradigm that enables online distillation under the guidance of an end-to-end world model. Specifically, we develop a trainable reward model that infuses world knowledge into a teacher policy by aligning candidate trajectories with the future dynamics predicted by the world model. Subsequently, we propose policy distillation and world reward distillation to transfer the teacher's reasoning ability into a lightweight student policy, enhancing planning performance while preserving real-time deployability. Extensive experiments on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks show that our WPT achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simple policy architecture: it attains a 0.11 collision rate (open-loop) and achieves a 79.23 driving score (closed-loop) surpassing both world-model-based and imitation-learning methods in accuracy and safety. Moreover, the student sustains up to 4.9x faster inference, while retaining most of the gains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation
Jiang, Guangfeng
Luo, Yueru
Liu, Jun
Huang, Yi
Zhu, Yiyao
Qu, Zhan
Chen, Dave Zhenyu
Liu, Bingbing
Yan, Xu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in world models, which primarily aim to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between an agent's actions and the evolving environment. However, existing approaches often suffer from tight runtime coupling or depend on offline reward signals, resulting in substantial inference overhead or hindering end-to-end optimization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WPT, a World-to-Policy Transfer training paradigm that enables online distillation under the guidance of an end-to-end world model. Specifically, we develop a trainable reward model that infuses world knowledge into a teacher policy by aligning candidate trajectories with the future dynamics predicted by the world model. Subsequently, we propose policy distillation and world reward distillation to transfer the teacher's reasoning ability into a lightweight student policy, enhancing planning performance while preserving real-time deployability. Extensive experiments on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks show that our WPT achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simple policy architecture: it attains a 0.11 collision rate (open-loop) and achieves a 79.23 driving score (closed-loop) surpassing both world-model-based and imitation-learning methods in accuracy and safety. Moreover, the student sustains up to 4.9x faster inference, while retaining most of the gains.
title WPT: World-to-Policy Transfer via Online World Model Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20095