Planning with Reasoning using Vision Language World Model
Authors: name: Delong Chen; name: Theo Moutakanni; name: Willy Chung; name: Yejin Bang; name: Ziwei Ji; name: Allen Bolourchi; name: Pascale Fung
Published: 2025-09-02 18:18:57

Abstract: Effective planning requires strong world models, but high-level world models
that can understand and reason about actions with semantic and temporal
abstraction remain largely underdeveloped. We introduce the Vision Language
World Model (VLWM), a foundation model trained for language-based world
modeling on natural videos. Given visual observations, the VLWM first infers
the overall goal achievements then predicts a trajectory composed of
interleaved actions and world state changes. Those targets are extracted by
iterative LLM Self-Refine conditioned on compressed future observations
represented by Tree of Captions. The VLWM learns both an action policy and a
dynamics model, which respectively facilitates reactive system-1 plan decoding
and reflective system-2 planning via cost minimization. The cost evaluates the
semantic distance between the hypothetical future states given by VLWM
roll-outs and the expected goal state, and is measured by a critic model that
we trained in a self-supervised manner. The VLWM achieves state-of-the-art
Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA) performance on both benchmark evaluations
and our proposed PlannerArena human evaluations, where system-2 improves the
Elo score by +27% upon system-1. The VLWM models also outperforms strong VLM
baselines on RoboVQA and WorldPrediction benchmark.