Concept dictionary
World Model
A world model is a representation — learned from experience or built by hand — that a system uses to predict how an environment may change and how its own actions may affect future states.
- Review state
- Reviewed in POC
- Freshness
- Current
- Version
- 3
Also called
- World Model
- World Models
Remember it this wayThe system acts on its model of the world, not the world directly.
In plain language
The model captures selected regularities about objects, actors, dynamics, or consequences so an AI system can simulate possibilities or plan beyond the immediate input.
Why it matters
Planning depends on the representation matching the relevant environment. Missing rules, changing conditions, or mistaken identity can produce confident but unsafe action.
Example
A robot uses a learned representation of movement and object interaction to predict which route and action sequence is likely to reach a target safely.
Common misconception
A world model is not a complete or objective copy of the world and does not establish common sense or humanlike understanding.
Related terms
Sources
- Ha and Schmidhuber, World Modelsprimary research on learning compressed spatial and temporal representations of environments for agent behavior.
Learn more
- Check assumptions against reality with [[context-to-reality-drift|Context-to-Reality Drift]].