World Model Papers

Selected list of papers on World Models that I found interesting and/or useful in chronological order (mostly 2024 and before). For clarification since the term is overloaded now, world model is mainly referring to a learned representation of a (typically visual) environment that is useful for downstream model-based RL tasks -- not the LLM "world model" term! Suggestions and pull requests are welcome and appreciated!

Areas

• General World Models
• Policy Improvements
• Language-oriented
• Visual and Robotics

General World Models

• D. Ha and J. Schmidhuber, "Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution", 2018. [site] | [code] | [bibtex]
• D. Freeman and L. Metz and D. Ha, "Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Forward Prediction", 2019. [site] | [code] | [bibtex]
• Kipf et al., "Contrastive Learning of Structured World Models", 2020. [code] | [bibtex]
• Zhang et al., "World Model as a Graph: Learning Latent Landmarks for Planning", 2021. [code] | [bibtex]
• V. Micheli, and E. Alonso and F. Fleuret, "Transformers are Sample-Efficient World Models", 2023. [code] | [bibtex]
• Deng et al., "Facing Off World Model Backbones: RNNs, Transformers, and S4", 2023. [site] | [bibtex]

Policy Improvements

• (DreamerV1) Hafner et al., "Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination" 2019. [code] | [bibtex]
• (DreamerV2) Hafner et al., "Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models", 2020. [code] | [bibtex]
• (TransDreamer) Chen et al., TransDreamer: Reinforcement Learning with Transformer World Models", 2022. [bibtex]
• (CASCADE) Xu et al., Learning General World Models in a Handful of Reward-Free Deployments, 2022. [code] | [site] | [bibtex]
• (DreamerV3) Hafner et al., "Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models", 2023. [code] | [bibtex]
• (Voyager) Wang et al., "Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models", 2023. [code] | [site] | [bibtex]

Language-oriented

• Cowen-Rivers and Naradowsky, "Emergent Communication with World Models", 2020. [bibtex]
• (DECKARD) Nottingham et al., "Do Embodied Agents Dream of Pixelated Sheep: Embodied Decision Making using Language Guided World Modelling", 2023. [code] | [bibtex]
• (RAP) Hao et al., "Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model", 2023. [code] | [bibtex]
• (LanGWM) Poudel et al., "LanGWM: Language Grounded World Model", 2023. [bibtex]
• (Dynalang) Lin et al. "Learning to Model the World with Language", 2023. [code] | [site] | [bibtex]
• (Language-guided WM) Zhang et al. "Language-Guided World Models: A Model-Based Approach to AI Control", 2024. [code] | [site] | [bibtex]

Visual and Robotics

• (PathDreamer) Koh et al. "PathDreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigation", 2021. [code] | [blog] | [bibtex]
• Seo et al. "Masked World Models for Visual Control", 2022. [code] | [site] | [bibtex]