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arXiv · 2610.22825

World Action Critic (WAC) Model: Joint Foresight and Criticism for Policy Learning

Xiangteng Zhang·Haoyuan Liu·Yang Guan·Jingliang Duan·Yao Lyu·Tao Zhang·Shuai Zhang·Kehua Sheng·Bo Zhang·Shengbo Eben Li
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Abstract

World models have shown considerable promise in sequential decision-making by anticipating the consequences of actions and providing predictive foresight for policy learning. However, learning to reason about counterfactual actions remains challenging, since predictive objectives may underemphasize information critical for action evaluation, while unexecuted actions lack observed futures for direct supervision. To address these challenges, we propose the World Action Critic (WAC) Model, which proposes multimodal action candidates and jointly learns candidate-conditioned future prediction and consequence evaluation. In our proposed framework, critic supervision directly shapes intermediate predictive representations during rollout, encouraging them to retain information needed to distinguish action quality. Observed futures supervise prediction for executed actions, while external task-quality targets provide evaluation signals for counterfactual candidates. Through joint optimization, critic signals from these candidates propagate into predictive representations without requiring their observed futures. Our theoretical analysis characterizes critic-guided feature retention and bounds candidate-selection regret. Applied to autonomous driving, WAC achieves 93.4 PDMS on NAVSIM-v1, demonstrating the effectiveness of jointly learning predictive foresight and consequence evaluation.

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Xiangteng Zhang, Haoyuan Liu, Yang Guan, Jingliang Duan, Yao Lyu, Tao Zhang, Shuai Zhang, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Shengbo Eben Li. 2026-10-16. World Action Critic (WAC) Model: Joint Foresight and Criticism for Policy Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22825

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