world model

English

Etymology

Compound of world +‎ model.

Noun

world model (plural world models)

1. (artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning) A predictive model that has been internalised by an agent which is used to forecast what consequences its actions will have on the environment (i.e. world) that it interacts with.
   • 1983, James F. Allen, Johannes A. Koomen, “Planning using a temporal world model”, in Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, page 741:

     Current problem solving systems are constrained in their applicability by inadequate world models. We suggest a world model based on a temporal logic. This approach allows the problem solver to gather constraints on the ordering of actions without having to commit to an ordering when a conflict is detected.

   • 2018, David Ha, Jürgen Schmidhuber, “World Models”, in arXiv‎^[1], page 2:

     In this work, we build probabilistic generative models of OpenAI Gym environments. The RNN-based world models are trained using collected observations recorded from the actual game environment. After training the world models, we can use them mimic the complete environment and train agents using them.

   • 2024 February 17, @ylecun, Twitter‎^[2]:

     The generation of mostly realistic-looking videos from prompts *does not* indicate that a system understands the physical world. Generation is very different from causal prediction from a world model.