AnyGoal: On World Model Generalization Beyond Expert Rollouts

Heejeong Nam, Divyat Mahajan, Quentin Le Lidec, Randall Balestriero, David Klindt

The goal of a world model is to capture the dynamics of an environment. This has the great appeal that it allows agents to plan and simulate a course of actions with the help of a world model. For these uses to be reliable, however, the learned dynamics must behave well beyond the specific state-action combinations observed in expert rollouts. Despite this, the relationship between data coverage, dynamics generalization, and downstream planning performance remains underexplored. We study this relationship through the lens of compositional generalization: can a world model recombine familiar state and action factors into valid dynamics? To answer this, we introduce AnyGoal, a benchmark of goal-shifted task variants built from widely used world-model environments, together with an open-source library. Each task is designed to be within reach of a world model that has learned the underlying dynamics: individual state factors and actions remain within their training support, but their combinations are underrepresented in expert trajectories. Across multiple environments and world model families, we find that current models consistently exhibit failures under these recombinations. By…