Model What Matters: Decision-Guided Selective World Modeling for Language Agents

Maolin Ran, Minda Chen, Di Huang, Wei Xiong, Fei Huang +1

Reinforcement learning provides a direct mechanism for optimizing task objectives in large language model-driven agents, but task rewards are typically sparse trajectory-level signals that only evaluate task success, without directly supervising action-conditioned environment transitions, leaving the model with limited explicit understanding of action consequences and environment dynamics. Recent work introduces auxiliary supervision through policy and world modeling co-training, yet typically treats complete environmental observations uniformly as world modeling targets, overlooking the varying decision relevance of observation content. We propose DGS-WM (Decision-Guided Selective World Modeling), a decision-guided policy-world modeling co-training approach for language agents. DGS-WM employs a Decision-Guided Observation Selection component that filters observation units with decision value as world modeling targets based on their support for subsequent policy responses, and a Confidence-Adaptive Weighting component that adaptively adjusts supervision strength according to the model's prediction confidence on selected targets. Together, these components form a decision-aware…