SkipWorld: Latent Skip Planning with Distilled World Models for Efficient Visual Navigation

Abstract

World-model-based visual navigation enables action planning by predicting future states under candidate trajectories. However, long-horizon rollout remains challenging: models are often trained with ground-truth visual histories but deployed in closed-loop prediction, and evaluating many candidates with step-by-step rollout is computationally expensive. We propose SkipWorld, a latent skip planning framework for efficient visual navigation. SkipWorld introduces three components: (i) Latent AutoRoll, which trains a world model to recursively roll out future states in latent space, reducing the mismatch between training and closed-loop inference; (ii) SkipDistill, which distills the latent autoregressive model into a skip world model that directly predicts long-stride future latent states; and (iii) Skip-then-Refine Planning, a dual-model coarse-to-fine planner that first filters candidate trajectories with the skip model and then reranks selected candidates with the stronger autoregressive model. This design preserves accurate trajectory evaluation while reducing redundant rollout computation. Experiments on RECON, HuRoN, SCAND, and TartanDrive show that, compared with NWM, SkipWorld reduces the average ATE by 4.2% and RPE by 2.7%, while decreasing planning time by 62.4% with a 2.7-fold speedup.