Latent World Models Should Plan with Distances Along the Latent Manifold
Latent world models such as LeWM plan by searching for an action sequence whose predicted terminal latent is closest to the goal latent under an ambient norm, such as the Euclidean distance. Planning with such a cost assumes that proximity in the ambient latent space reflects proximity to the goal in the environment. Studying LeWM, we find that this assumption holds only in a small neighborhood around the goal, whereas farther away the L2 cost forms spurious low-cost basins that trap the planner. Yet neighborhood-based embeddings show that the latents retain the underlying physical state. We therefore hypothesize that the latents lie near a curved, low-dimensional manifold, and that the t...
| Authors | Zunzhi You, Linwei Tao, Siyu Xu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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