World Modeling with Probabilistic Structure Integration
Authors: name: Klemen Kotar, name: Wanhee Lee, name: Rahul Venkatesh, name: Honglin Chen, name: Daniel Bear, name: Jared Watrous, name: Simon Kim, name: Khai Loong Aw, name: Lilian Naing Chen, name: Stefan Stojanov, name: Kevin Feigelis, name: Imran Thobani, name: Alex Durango, name: Khaled Jedoui, name: Atlas Kazemian, name: Dan Yamins

We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning
richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI
consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction,
involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form
of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set
of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables
in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we
show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data,
corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a
zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes
the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then
continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and
prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both
allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control
handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an
instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to
perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we
extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object
segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive
improvements.