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PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning

Summary

PROWL introduces a KL-constrained adversarial curriculum to improve world model robustness by actively eliciting high-error trajectories, using a Prioritized Adversarial Trajectory buffer to focus on unresolved failures. Evaluated in MineRL, it outperforms passive data training.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: Ahmet H. G\"uzel, Jenny Seidenschwarz, Benjamin Graham, Jonathan Sadeghi, Jeffrey Hawke, Jack Parker-Holder, Ilija Bogunovic
PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning
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[2605.18803] PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning

[Submitted on 11 May 2026]

Title:PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning

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Abstract:Modern action-conditioned video world models achieve strong short-horizon visual realism, yet remain unreliable on rare, interaction-critical transitions that dominate downstream planning and policy performance. Because passive demonstration data systematically under-samples these high-impact regimes, improving robustness requires actively eliciting model failures rather than relying on their natural occurrence. We introduce a KL-constrained adversarial curriculum in which a policy is trained to expose high-error trajectories of a diffusion-based world model while remaining close to the behavior distribution. The world model is continuously fine-tuned on these adversarially discovered trajectories, yielding an adversarial training loop that converts rare failures into a stable, near-distribution training signal without drifting into out-of-distribution exploitation. To maintain pressure on unresolved weaknesses as the model improves, we propose a Prioritized Adversarial Trajectory (PAT) buffer that re-ranks trajectories based on prediction error, action fidelity, and learning progress, focusing training on unresolved failure modes rather than repeatedly revisiting solved cases. We implement our approach in the MineRL framework and evaluate it on held-out out-of-distribution trajectories; PROWL improves robustness over models trained on passive data alone, reveals reward-hacking behaviors under weak behavioral constraints, and demonstrates that effective adversarial world-model training critically depends on balancing exploratory failure discovery with explicit behavioral regularization. Our results suggest that scalable world models benefit not only from larger datasets, but also from selectively generating informative training data.

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.18803 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.18803v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.18803

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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From: Ahmet Hamdi Güzel Mr [view email] [v1] Mon, 11 May 2026 14:24:19 UTC (6,352 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • Introduces adversarial training loop for world models using KL-constrained policy
  • Uses Prioritized Adversarial Trajectory buffer to focus on unresolved failure modes
  • Demonstrates improved robustness over passive data training in MineRL
  • Shows importance of balancing exploratory failure discovery and behavioral regularization

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.