Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866909984212647936 |
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| author | Qian, Cheng Acikgoz, Emre Can Li, Bingxuan Chen, Xiusi Zhang, Yuji He, Bingxiang Luo, Qinyu Hakkani-Tür, Dilek Tur, Gokhan Li, Yunzhu Ji, Heng |
| author_facet | Qian, Cheng Acikgoz, Emre Can Li, Bingxuan Chen, Xiusi Zhang, Yuji He, Bingxiang Luo, Qinyu Hakkani-Tür, Dilek Tur, Gokhan Li, Yunzhu Ji, Heng |
| contents | Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning. Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting. This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition. Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced. Attribution analysis further indicates that the primary bottleneck lies in the agents' capacity to decide when to simulate, how to interpret predicted outcomes, and how to integrate foresight into downstream reasoning. These findings underscore the need for mechanisms that foster calibrated, strategic interaction with world models, paving the way toward more reliable anticipatory cognition in future agent systems. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03905 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight Qian, Cheng Acikgoz, Emre Can Li, Bingxuan Chen, Xiusi Zhang, Yuji He, Bingxiang Luo, Qinyu Hakkani-Tür, Dilek Tur, Gokhan Li, Yunzhu Ji, Heng Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning. Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting. This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition. Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced. Attribution analysis further indicates that the primary bottleneck lies in the agents' capacity to decide when to simulate, how to interpret predicted outcomes, and how to integrate foresight into downstream reasoning. These findings underscore the need for mechanisms that foster calibrated, strategic interaction with world models, paving the way toward more reliable anticipatory cognition in future agent systems. |
| title | Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03905 |