Lucid Dreaming for World Models: Learning to Doubt Imagination and Decide by Trust

Abstract:World models enable agents to learn and plan in imagination, but predictions beyond their experience can become unreliable and mislead decisions. Existing uncertainty estimates derived from predictions can remain overconfident on unfamiliar state-action pairs. We propose the Lucid World Model (LucidWM), which learns doubt from experience and propagates trust through imagination. By integrating Subjective Logic into categorical latent transitions, LucidWM distinguishes predicted outcomes from their evidential support and assigns each transition a degree of doubt. The complement of this doubt defines transition-level trust, which accumulates multiplicatively along imagined trajectories to reweight returns for policy learning and guide action selection. Uncertainty estimation requires no additional parameters or forward passes. Evaluated on four base world models against seventeen uncertainty readouts, LucidWM detects environmental changes and signals uncertainty during action-corrupted rollouts. In a controlled navigation case study, acting on trust reduces the number of steps required to reach the goal from 362 to 190. Fifteen demonstration videos show how LucidWM doubts its dreams and acts on that doubt. Videos are available at this https URL.

30 pages, 22 figures, 8 tables. Project page: this https URL

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.37156 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.37156v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37156 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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