An Introduction to World Models for Generalist Agents

Zhihui Zhu

World models have recently emerged as a promising direction toward developing generalist agents capable of understanding, predicting, and interacting with diverse environments. However, despite growing interest, the concept of a world model remains loosely defined, encompassing approaches ranging from predictive dynamics models and learned simulators to models that jointly generate future observations and actions. This introductory paper aims to clarify the concept of world models and provide a unified perspective on their role in developing generalist agents. Starting from the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) framework, we connect world modeling to classical control, dynamical systems, signal processing, and reinforcement learning. We introduce different approaches to world modeling, emphasizing the knowledge they capture, their learning objectives, and how they support decision-making. We further explore the relationship between world modeling and policy learning, highlighting how these capabilities can be unified through conditional prediction without requiring separate models. Rather than offering an exhaustive survey of existing methods, this paper…