Title: WoW!: World Models in a Closed-Loop World
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: world models, video generation, embodied AI, generative models

Abstract: Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchmarks adopt open-loop protocols that emphasize visual quality in isolation, leaving the core issue of embodied utility unresolved, i.e., *do WMs actually help agents succeed at embodied tasks?*
To address this gap, we introduce WoW!, the first open platform that benchmarks WMs in a closed-loop setting that mirrors real agent-environment interactions. WoW! provides a unified online planning strategy and a standardized action API, enabling heterogeneous WMs for decision making.
We curate four closed-loop environments that rigorously evaluate diverse WMs, prioritize task success as the primary metric, and move beyond the common focus on visual quality; we also present the first data scaling law for world models in embodied settings.
Our study uncovers three surprises: (1) visual quality alone does not guarantee task success—controllability matters more; (2) scaling post-training with action-observation data is more effective than upgrading the pretrained video generators; and (3) allocating more inference-time compute allows WMs to substantially improve closed-loop performance. By centering evaluation on closed-loop outcomes, WoW! establishes a new benchmark for the systematic assessment of WMs.

TL;DR: By grounding assessment in embodied task success instead of video metrics, WoW! provides a principled yardstick for future research on generative world models in the context of embodiment