Imagined Rollouts are Kinematic, Not Dynamic: A Diagnosis of Long-Horizon World-Model Failure
Summary
This paper diagnoses long-horizon failures in world models, attributing them to kinematic rather than dynamic imagination. The authors introduce a metric (iKCE) and show that imagined rollouts fail to capture dynamic regime changes even as policy rewards collapse.
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Paper page - Imagined Rollouts are Kinematic, Not Dynamic: A Diagnosis of Long-Horizon World-Model Failure
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.05966
Abstract
World models exhibit long-horizon failures due to kinematic rather than dynamic imagination, as demonstrated by measuring imagined kinematic-consistency error which remains flat while policy rewards collapse across friction boundaries.
Long-horizon failure inworld modelsis conventionally attributed tocompounding error, a generic framing that does not distinguish what kind of error compounds. We propose akinematic-vs-dynamic reframing:world modelstend to imagine kinematically rather than dynamically. We operationalize this as the imaginedKinematic-Consistency Error, a per-step diagnostic that measures how far arolloutdeparts from aclosed-form kinematic null, paired with aperturbation protocolthat tests whetheriKCEresponds when physical conditions cross a regime boundary. We instantiate the diagnostic on a releasedDreamerV3checkpoint trained onDMC walker-walk, where imaginediKCEruns roughly two orders of magnitude above that of matched real-physicsrollouts. Across a friction sweep that crosses thegait-collapse boundary, the model’siKCEstays statistically flat even as the trained policy’s reward collapses through the same range, providing the kinematic-not-dynamic signature. The diagnostic distinguishes kinematic from dynamic imagination at horizons longer than theembodiment’s gait period.
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