Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models

Understand

The concept of world models has garnered significant attention due to advancements in multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 and video generation models such as Sora, which are central to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

• This survey offers a comprehensive review of the literature on world models.
• Generally, world models are regarded as tools for either understanding the present state of the world or predicting its future dynamics.
• This review presents a systematic categorization of world models, emphasizing two primary functions: (1) constructing internal representations to understand the mechanisms of the world, and (2) predicting future states to simulate and guide decision-making.