arXiv:2611.15215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In robotics and embodied AI, a core challenge for world models is adapting to sudden, persistent, yet initially unknown changes in robot dynamics during interaction. For instance, when a robotic arm grasps an object with an unknown payload, the robot dynamics change suddenly. If the world model fails to adapt, its prediction errors accumulate over the open-loop rollout and ultimately mislead the robot's actions. Existing world models, however, struggle to simultaneously satisfy three critical requirements for dynamics adaptation: responsiveness, reacting promptly to sudden changes to curb prediction error accumulation; stability, distinguishing persistent changes from transient disturbances to prevent incorrect updates; and persistence, retaining the adapted dynamics without new observations so that later predictions do not revert to the old dynamics. Inspired by predictive coding in the human brain with multi-timescale adaptation, we propose AFTER-WM, a world model with Adaptive Fast-slow Timescales for Error-driven Retention, whose prediction errors drive a fast correction that fades and a slow correction that persists, while dynamically adjusting the combination weights of pre-trained experts without altering them, to overcome the trade-offs among responsiveness, stability and persistence. On five simulated robot datasets and real UAV data, AFTER-WM has a lower multi-step mean error than all ten compared models and the highest mean return in a joint-failure control task. In simulation, its multistep mean error is 16%-34% below the strongest compared model's and is also the lowest 1-4 steps after a change and under transient disturbances alone, and its step-40 error is the lowest as well, reflecting responsiveness, stability and persistence. All code (method, baselines, experiments) and datasets will be released online.
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