How Representational Priors Shape Generalization in World Action Models

Abstract

World action models (WAMs) are shown to substantially diverge under generalization performance based on their generative backbones. We investigate this gap through the representational geometry that WAMs inherit from their backbones and how policy training reorganizes it. Our central hypothesis is that a useful representational prior would structure geometry that separates nuisance information from the in-distribution manifold in advance of training as a policy. We quantify this with nuisance orthogonality; orthogonality of the feature under visual variation outside the empirical in-distribution manifold. Across various image and video backbones, we show that a higher orthogonality from the representational prior is associated with stronger robustness to visual variations after WAM training, enabling policy generalization measurable prospectively for world models. In addition, analyzing the resulting robust WAMs reveals nuisance suppression; relative suppression of feature displacement caused by such variations and robust action generation of the policy. Together, these findings provide a geometric perspective on how the representational prior of the world model shapes the generalization performance of WAMs.