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Main Authors: Zollicoffer, Geigh, Chopra, Tanush, Yan, Mingkuan, Ma, Xiaoxu, Eaton, Kenneth, Riedl, Mark
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01119
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author Zollicoffer, Geigh
Chopra, Tanush
Yan, Mingkuan
Ma, Xiaoxu
Eaton, Kenneth
Riedl, Mark
author_facet Zollicoffer, Geigh
Chopra, Tanush
Yan, Mingkuan
Ma, Xiaoxu
Eaton, Kenneth
Riedl, Mark
contents AI systems deployed in the real world must contend with distractions and out-of-distribution (OOD) noise that can destabilize their policies and lead to unsafe behavior. While robust training can reduce sensitivity to some forms of noise, it is infeasible to anticipate all possible OOD conditions. To mitigate this issue, we develop an algorithm that leverages a world model's inherent measure of surprise to reduce the impact of noise in world model--based reinforcement learning agents. We introduce both multi-representation and single-representation rejection sampling, enabling robustness to settings with multiple faulty sensors or a single faulty sensor. While the introduction of noise typically degrades agent performance, we show that our techniques preserve performance relative to baselines under varying types and levels of noise across multiple environments within self-driving simulation domains (CARLA and Safety Gymnasium). Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methods enhance the stability of two state-of-the-art world models with markedly different underlying architectures: Cosmos and DreamerV3. Together, these results highlight the robustness of our approach across world modeling domains. We release our code at https://github.com/Bluefin-Tuna/WISER .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01119
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle World Model Robustness via Surprise Recognition
Zollicoffer, Geigh
Chopra, Tanush
Yan, Mingkuan
Ma, Xiaoxu
Eaton, Kenneth
Riedl, Mark
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
AI systems deployed in the real world must contend with distractions and out-of-distribution (OOD) noise that can destabilize their policies and lead to unsafe behavior. While robust training can reduce sensitivity to some forms of noise, it is infeasible to anticipate all possible OOD conditions. To mitigate this issue, we develop an algorithm that leverages a world model's inherent measure of surprise to reduce the impact of noise in world model--based reinforcement learning agents. We introduce both multi-representation and single-representation rejection sampling, enabling robustness to settings with multiple faulty sensors or a single faulty sensor. While the introduction of noise typically degrades agent performance, we show that our techniques preserve performance relative to baselines under varying types and levels of noise across multiple environments within self-driving simulation domains (CARLA and Safety Gymnasium). Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methods enhance the stability of two state-of-the-art world models with markedly different underlying architectures: Cosmos and DreamerV3. Together, these results highlight the robustness of our approach across world modeling domains. We release our code at https://github.com/Bluefin-Tuna/WISER .
title World Model Robustness via Surprise Recognition
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01119