Quo Vadis, World Modeling?

Yu Yang; Xuemeng Yang; Licheng Wen; Lingdong Kong; Xiaobin Hu; Dongyue Lu; Wei Chow; Xiyan Huang; Yuxiang Feng; Yue Liao; Jianbiao Mei; Daocheng Fu; Rong Wu; Pinlong Cai; Ran Yi; Ying Tai; Jiangning Zhang; Botian Shi; Yong Liu; Shuicheng Yan

arXiv · 2608.02713

Quo Vadis, World Modeling?

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Continually improving agents require dynamic interaction feedback beyond static supervision, yet direct real-environment interaction is costly, slow, unsafe, and hard to parallelize. World modeling offers a natural intermediate proxy that allows agents to query lower-cost, more controllable feedback before committing to real actions. Classical world models instantiate this proxy primarily through future physical-state prediction, a formulation useful yet narrow for agents that require actionable feedback beyond raw state transitions. In this work, we conceptualize Agent-Centric Interactive World Proxies, shifting the fundamental paradigm from physical state transitions to agent-usable information transitions, such as execution outcomes, retrieved experiences or skills, and verification signals, broadening the scope of world modeling to provide versatile feedback for continually improving agents. To systematically map this design space, we organize world proxies into six functional forms based on their feedback modalities: dynamics, spatial, execution, memory/experience, skill, and reward/verification proxies, which together characterize the primary ways world modeling serves agent improvement. We further analyze how these proxies empower agents across three progressive levels: L.1 Inference-Time Guidance, where proxy outputs enrich in-context information for superior decisions; L.2 Training-Time Optimization, where proxy outputs yield rewards, critiques, or synthetic rollouts for policy learning; and L.3 Agent-Proxy Co-Evolution, where real-environment evidence continuously updates both the proxy and the agent for co-evolution. Ultimately, this work recasts world modeling into an agent-centric paradigm, establishing a roadmap for building world proxies that empower agents to plan better, learn faster, and evolve continually.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV cs.AI cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Yu Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Lingdong Kong, Xiaobin Hu, Dongyue Lu, Wei Chow, Xiyan Huang, Yuxiang Feng, Yue Liao, Jianbiao Mei, Daocheng Fu, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Ran Yi, Ying Tai, Jiangning Zhang, Botian Shi, Yong Liu, Shuicheng Yan. 2026-08-03. Quo Vadis, World Modeling?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02713

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized various domains with their exceptional performance across numerous applications. However, Model Inversion (MI) attacks, which disclose private information about the training dataset by abusing access to the trained models, have emerged as a formidable privacy threat. Given a trained network, these attacks enable adversaries to reconstruct high-fidelity data that closely aligns with the private training samples, posing significant privacy concerns. Despite the rapid advances in the field, we lack a comprehensive and systematic overview of existing MI attacks and defenses. To fill this gap, this paper thoroughly investigates this realm and presents a holistic survey. Firstly, our work briefly reviews early MI studies on traditional machine learning scenarios. We then elaborately analyze and compare numerous recent attacks and defenses on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across multiple modalities and learning tasks. By meticulously analyzing their distinctive features, we summarize and classify these methods into different categories and provide a novel taxonomy. Finally, this paper discusses promising research directions and presents potential solutions to open issues. To facilitate further study on MI attacks and defenses, we have implemented an open-source model inversion toolbox on GitHub (https://github.com/ffhibnese/Model-Inversion-Attack-ToolBox).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ALINA: Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm

Labels are the cornerstone of supervised machine learning algorithms. Most visual recognition methods are fully supervised, using bounding boxes or pixel-wise segmentations for object localization. Traditional labeling methods, such as crowd-sourcing, are prohibitive due to cost, data privacy, amount of time, and potential errors on large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel annotation framework, Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm (ALINA), which can be used for labeling taxiway datasets that consist of different camera perspectives and variable weather attributes (sunny and cloudy). Additionally, the CIRCular threshoLd pixEl Discovery And Traversal (CIRCLEDAT) algorithm has been proposed, which is an integral step in determining the pixels corresponding to taxiway line markings. Once the pixels are identified, ALINA generates corresponding pixel coordinate annotations on the frame. Using this approach, 60,249 frames from the taxiway dataset, AssistTaxi have been labeled. To evaluate the performance, a context-based edge map (CBEM) set was generated manually based on edge features and connectivity. The detection rate after testing the annotated labels with the CBEM set was recorded as 98.45%, attesting its dependability and effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response

Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-centric assessment. To study this building-centric gap, we introduce \method{}, a diagnostic benchmark built on xBD, a pre/post-disaster satellite dataset with building-level damage labels. \method{} enriches building instances with OpenStreetMap-derived functional labels and contains 134{,}108 task-specific instruction records across 15 task types, spanning instance-level assessment, scene-level counting, multi-instance reasoning, and structured report generation. The benchmark supports RGB pre/post-disaster imagery, single- and multi-view instance formulations, and scene-level RGB/SAR diagnostic inputs. Experiments with general-domain and remote-sensing VLMs show that models perform better on visible damage cues than on building-function understanding, multi-instance reasoning, counting, and grounded reporting. Instruction tuning improves performance on several tasks but does not close this building-centric gap.

cs.CV↗