How Should World Models Be Evaluated? A Decision-Making-Centric Position

World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI. Yet the term now refers to several different objects: action-conditioned environment models, latent imagination models, future-video predictors, interactive neural simulators, latent predictive representations, and synthetic-data engines. Evaluation has broadened with the term. Recent papers measure video realism, perceptual similarity, instruction following, physical plausibility, policy ranking, executability, planning success, and downstream policy improvement. The result is not only metric diversity but also a recurring problem of claim/evidence mismatch: papers frequently make a stronger claim about what their model is useful for than their evaluation can actually establish. This paper surveys the recent literature and argues that the central question is use-dependent. When a model is presented as a world model for embodied decision-making, a more decisive issue is not whether it generates visually compelling videos, but whether it supports reliable counterfactual reasoning, policy evaluation, planning, and policy optimization under intervention, policy-induced distribution shift, and long-horizon rollout. We organize the literature using an L0--L7 ladder that ranges from visual plausibility to policy optimization utility. In our interpretation, L0--L3 are most naturally read as diagnostics of generated artifacts, L4 is often the first genuinely interventional test, and L5--L7 provide the most direct evidence of decision usefulness. Based on this diagnosis, we propose a decision-making-centric evaluation framework and a benchmark protocol that foreground counterfactual action fidelity, closed-loop rollout validity, reward/value prediction, policy-ranking agreement, optimization lift, model exploitability, and uncertainty calibration.

Anticipation-VLA: Solving Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks via Anticipation-based Subgoal Generation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling robots to perform tasks based on natural language instructions and current visual input. However, existing VLA models struggle with long-horizon tasks due to compounding errors. Prior methods decompose tasks into subtasks of fixed granularity, which cannot adapt to the varying complexity of execution states, limiting their robustness in long-horizon tasks. To overcome this, we introduce Anticipation Model, which adaptively and recursively generates future subgoals. This model continuously adapts as the task unfolds, adjusting future subgoals in response to evolving dynamics, facilitating more reliable planning paths. Building on this concept, we propose Anticipation-VLA, a hierarchical VLA model that leverages the anticipation model to generate actionable subgoals that guide VLA policy execution. We implement Anticipation-VLA with finetuning a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) for high-level subgoal generation and a goal-conditioned VLA policy for low-level action execution. Experiments in both simulated and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Anticipation-VLA, highlighting the importance of adaptive and recursive subgoal generation for robust policy execution.

Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong generalization for robotic control, but finetuning them with reinforcement learning (RL) is constrained by the high cost and safety risks of real-world interaction. Training VLA models in interactive world models avoids these issues but introduces several challenges, including pixel-level world modeling, multi-view consistency, and compounding errors under sparse rewards. Building on recent advances across large multimodal models and model-based RL, we propose VLA-MBPO, a practical framework to tackle these problems in VLA finetuning. Our approach has three key design choices: (i) adapting unified multimodal models (UMMs) for data-efficient world modeling; (ii) an interleaved view decoding mechanism to enforce multi-view consistency; and (iii) chunk-level branched rollout to mitigate error compounding. Theoretical analysis and experiments across simulation and real-world tasks demonstrate that VLA-MBPO significantly improves policy performance and sample efficiency, underscoring its robustness and scalability for real-world robotic deployment.