Dual-Frontier: When Can an Agent Trust Its World Model?

arXiv:2609.26293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned world models are becoming essential to general-purpose agents: by predicting action consequences, they support planning and decision-making while reducing reliance on costly trial and error. This reliance creates a fundamental ambiguity: when a world-model-guided decision fails, the trajectory alone may not reveal whether the agent's decision rule or the world model caused the loss. We formalize this failure-attribution problem as a counterfactual decomposition of return loss and prove that its components are not identifiable from passive interaction, even for finite-horizon planners. This obstruction motivates Dual-Frontier, a learning principle that admits a world-model-guided decision only when its predicted advantage exceeds a certified bound on decision-relevant world-model error; otherwise, evidence is allocated to world-model verification. Action-conditioned value bounds and a closed-loop extension guarantee non-decreasing return for admitted decisions. Calibrated gates and simultaneous confidence sequences support adaptive evidence reuse, with sufficient and necessary verification bounds. Controlled learned-model experiments validate the predicted failure modes and certification behavior, while cross-backbone tool-use benchmarks instantiate the same verify-then-promote rule in realistic agent world-model pipelines, consistently improving decision quality and reliability.

Title:Dual-Frontier: When Can an Agent Trust Its World Model?

Abstract:Learned world models are becoming essential to general-purpose agents: by predicting action consequences, they support planning and decision-making while reducing reliance on costly trial and error. This reliance creates a fundamental ambiguity: when a world-model-guided decision fails, the trajectory alone may not reveal whether the agent's decision rule or the world model caused the loss. We formalize this failure-attribution problem as a counterfactual decomposition of return loss and prove that its components are not identifiable from passive interaction, even for finite-horizon planners. This obstruction motivates Dual-Frontier, a learning principle that admits a world-model-guided decision only when its predicted advantage exceeds a certified bound on decision-relevant world-model error; otherwise, evidence is allocated to world-model verification. Action-conditioned value bounds and a closed-loop extension guarantee non-decreasing return for admitted decisions. Calibrated gates and simultaneous confidence sequences support adaptive evidence reuse, with sufficient and necessary verification bounds. Controlled learned-model experiments validate the predicted failure modes and certification behavior, while cross-backbone tool-use benchmarks instantiate the same verify-then-promote rule in realistic agent world-model pipelines, consistently improving decision quality and reliability.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.26293 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.26293v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.26293 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Dual-Frontier: When Can an Agent Trust Its World Model?

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