Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight

Understand

Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning.

• Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting.
• This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition.
• Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced.