arxivcs.RO2026-07-07
Imagined Rollouts are Kinematic, Not Dynamic: A Diagnosis of Long-Horizon World-Model Failure
Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Korbinian Moller, Yuan Gao, Christian Oefinger, Sebastian Schmidt, Johannes Betz
Long-horizon failure in world models is conventionally attributed to compounding error, a generic framing that does not distinguish what kind of error compounds. We propose a kinematic-vs-dynamic reframing: world models tend to imagine kinematically rather than dynamically. We op…