What is the Role of World Models in Decision-Making?

World models have recently gained popularity thanks to impressive results and the availability of data. However, no consensus has been reached on how they should help improve decision-making. This social aims to foster discussions around the role of world models in decision-making.

World models are used in many ways. Some approaches use world models as synthetic data generators. Others leverage them at test time to reason or evaluate policies. Video models, in addition to an inverse dynamics model, can be used to infer actions. Discussing those choices appears to be essential to assess their role in decision-making.

When data is scarce, some methods only learn a world model to improve representation learning and rely on model-free methods for decision-making to avoid hallucinations. We believe it is fruitful to discuss the scenarios for which world models can be trusted.

The exchanges can focus on discussing in which situations world models have an edge over algorithms that do not directly learn the transition dynamics. It is also not yet clear whether world models are more relevant at certain levels of hierarchy.

Finally, discussing why world models can enable better generalization can provide an answer to the question asked in this social.