[Submitted on 12 Aug 2026]
Title:ARC-Bench: Closed-Loop Replanning Masks Broken Action Ranking in Frozen JEPA World Models
View a PDF of the paper titled ARC-Bench: Closed-Loop Replanning Masks Broken Action Ranking in Frozen JEPA World Models, by Zhengshu Zhang and 1 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Reward-free latent world models plan by scoring candidate actions with distances in a frozen latent space: an action is preferred if its predicted future embedding lands closer to the goal embedding. This silently assumes that latent closeness is action-rankable, i.e., that ordering candidates by latent distance agrees with ordering them by true cost. We audit this assumption directly. We introduce ARC-Bench, a no-leak, fixed-candidate protocol that measures whether frozen JEPA-style objectives rank candidate actions correctly, and apply it to official released JEPA-WM checkpoints across navigation and manipulation-style control. The assumption fails, severely and structurally: on the official manipulation audits the top-scored candidate is almost always suboptimal, and the same inversion appears in the maze domains. A controlled visual-backbone extension shows that the defect persists when DINOv2 is replaced by video-pretrained V-JEPA 1 and V-JEPA 2 encoders at ViT-L/ViT-G scale. Provenance, undertraining, matched-budget backbone controls, and metric-circularity controls rule out trivial explanations. We then explain why this defect has stayed invisible: closed-loop replanning masks it. When we reduce the planner's replanning frequency, success collapses in both a navigation and a manipulation domain, and the episodes rescued by frequent replanning are enriched for severe first-plan ranking failures in the PointMaze first-plan diagnostic. Closed-loop success rates therefore systematically overstate the rankability of frozen latent representations. ARC-Bench supplies the measurement, and the masking mechanism the explanation, for methods that adapt, amortize, or replan around latent-space planners without directly auditing released JEPA-WM action rankability.
Comments: 15 pages, 7 figures
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.05461 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.05461v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05461
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Zhengshu Zhang [view email] [v1] Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:19:03 UTC (783 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled ARC-Bench: Closed-Loop Replanning Masks Broken Action Ranking in Frozen JEPA World Models, by Zhengshu Zhang and 1 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.AI
new | recent | 2026-09
Change to browse by:
cs cs.LG cs.RO
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)