Adaptive Compute in Latent World Models: When Depth Helps, Hurts, or Doesn't Matter

Abstract

Adaptive compute for world models -- early-exit or mixture-of-depths predictors that spend variable depth per rollout step -- presumes that extra depth buys better predictions. In autoregressive rollouts, where planning actually happens, that premise requires depth's per-step precision to survive composition. We test it directly with one pre-registered instrument, the shallow penalty rho = err(shallowest-exit rollout)/err(full-depth rollout), on nine DeepMind Control tasks under matched single-step (K=1) and multi-step (K=4) training, eight seeds each. Three regimes emerge: depth helps (intrinsic, 6/9 tasks, rho up to 8x), depth actively hurts (inversion, 2/9, rho down to 0.87x), or depth barely matters (flat). The inversion is created by training, not the dynamics: supervising early exits only at the first rollout step erases it (Delta=+0.28, n=8, non-overlapping distributions) -- a routability catch-22: the per-step deep supervision that makes exits routable also trains them to out-roll the full stack. The regime is predictable: a frozen dimensionality-only classifier, committed before training, labels held-out tasks correctly out-of-sample, including an extreme extrapolation. The inversion reproduces under a transformer predictor, yet its manifestation is configuration-dependent, shifting with metric space, horizon, encoder, backbone, and -- most strongly -- training data: on the two tasks we retrained, competent-policy data removes both the inversion and the intrinsic tradeoff, loss unchanged. In a CEM planner, rho predicts whether planning benefits from depth. Every threshold and gate was committed before the corresponding compute, including a pre-registered negative for the motivating hypothesis. Whether more compute helps a world model is not a task property; it is a property of the operating configuration, with a stable, predictable, mechanism-backed core.