ATM: Action-Consistency Transfer Matrix for Diagnosing and Improving Latent World Models

Abstract

Latent world models are increasingly used for control and goal-conditioned planning, yet assessing whether their learned representations are useful for planning usually requires slow, planner-coupled simulator evaluation with CEM or similar planners. Such evaluation is black-box and model-complexity-dependent: under the same protocol, different world models may require minutes to hours per checkpoint. In this work, we propose ATM, an Action-Consistency Transfer Matrix for diagnosing whether latent transitions preserve action semantics relevant to planning. ATM compares action information in real encoded transitions and model-predicted transitions through lightweight post-hoc probes, producing an interpretable matrix that reveals representation quality, transition-domain inconsistency, and failure modes without simulator rollout. It can also be collapsed into a simple screening score for within-task ranking across checkpoints, variants, and world models. When the true success gap is non-trivial, ATM achieves highly reliable pairwise ranking, while reducing minutes-to-hours CEM evaluation to seconds-level transition analysis, yielding more than 100x speedup in our setup. We further introduce AITS, showing that action-identifiability is not only diagnostic but also a useful training signal for improving downstream planning without changing the planner.