Paper Detail
Jiawei Wang, Ke Rui, Yushen Zuo, Yichun Feng, Minglei Li
JEPA-style latent world models can use Euclidean distance to a goal latent as the cost for model-predictive control (MPC). Strong decoding of task variables, however, does not guarantee that this particular cost ranks candidate action sequences by real task progress. We call the latter property decision-metric alignment. We introduce Plan-Real Spearman, which measures latent--real rank agreement on random plans, and CEM-stage Spearman, which measures the same agreement as cross-entropy-method (CEM) search concentrates its proposal. We analyze sufficient conditions under which latent distance preserves real-cost rankings, identifying encoder distortion, terminal rollout error, and candidate margins as the controlling quantities. Guided by the observed empirical alignment gap, DA-LeWM augments LeWM with inverse-dynamics and demonstration-conditioned goal-action heads. Across all our experiments, DA-LeWM accelerates convergence and achieves higher online success than LeWM, while probe scores remain similar. These results show that action-conditioned objectives improve the geometry used by Euclidean-cost, CEM-based latent MPC.
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@misc{wang2026decision,
title = {Decision-Metric Alignment in Latent World Models: Diagnostics and Action-Conditioned Objectives for MPC Planning},
author = {Jiawei Wang and Ke Rui and Yushen Zuo and Yichun Feng and Minglei Li},
year = {2026},
abstract = {JEPA-style latent world models can use Euclidean distance to a goal latent as the cost for model-predictive control (MPC). Strong decoding of task variables, however, does not guarantee that this particular cost ranks candidate action sequences by real task progress. We call the latter property decision-metric alignment. We introduce Plan-Real Spearman, which measures latent--real rank agreement on random plans, and CEM-stage Spearman, which measures the same agreement as cross-entropy-method (C},
url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2608.18746},
keywords = {JEPA, latent world models, model-predictive control, decision-metric alignment, Plan-Real Spearman, CEM-stage Spearman, encoder distortion, DA-LeWM, inverse-dynamics, demonstration-conditioned goal-action, huggingface daily},
eprint = {2608.18746},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}