What Can Latent World Models Know? Physical Information in Multimodal Predictive Representations
A central premise of latent world models is that predicting the future encourages representations to internalize the physics of their environment. We ask which physical quantities are accessible in learned latent states, how this depends on training, and how those quantities relate to the model's predictions. We present PokeWorld, a simulated environment in which a robot finger pushes objects whose mass, drag, and contact stiffness vary across episodes while remaining visually identical. We first measure parameter recovery from raw observation sequences, then train matched action-conditioned world models. Prediction targets can strongly shape latent content. For example, contact stiffness...
| Authors | Kaizhen Tan, Sizhe Xu, Xin Xu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.