From Masks to Worlds: A Hitchhiker's Guide to World Models
Authors: name: Jinbin Bai, name: Yu Lei, name: Hecong Wu, name: Yuchen Zhu, name: Shufan Li, name: Yi Xin, name: Xiangtai Li, name: Molei Tao, name: Aditya Grover, name: Ming-Hsuan Yang

This is not a typical survey of world models; it is a guide for those who
want to build worlds. We do not aim to catalog every paper that has ever
mentioned a ``world model". Instead, we follow one clear road: from early
masked models that unified representation learning across modalities, to
unified architectures that share a single paradigm, then to interactive
generative models that close the action-perception loop, and finally to
memory-augmented systems that sustain consistent worlds over time. We bypass
loosely related branches to focus on the core: the generative heart, the
interactive loop, and the memory system. We show that this is the most
promising path towards true world models.