What Do World Models Learn in RL? Probing Latent Representations in Learned Environment Simulators

World models learn to simulate environment dynamics from experience, enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning. But what do these models actually represent internally? We apply interpretability techniques--including linear and nonlinear probing, causal interventions, and attention analysis--to two architecturally distinct world models: IRIS (discrete token transformer) and DIAMOND (continuous diffusion UNet), trained on Atari Breakout and Pong. Using linear probes, we find that both models develop linearly decodable representations of game state variables (object positions, scores), with MLP probes yielding only marginally higher R^2, confirming that these representations are appro...

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