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This research investigates the geometric interplay between world-model training and policy optimization in LLM agents, revealing that their parameter updates occupy complementary subspaces. The study demonstrates that sequential integration enhances robustness against input perturbations and expands behavioral exploration compared to separate training pipelines. These findings offer critical insights for engineering post-training procedures that effectively merge environmental understanding with task-specific capabilities.
How do World Models and Policies Compose in LLM Agents? A Joint Spectral and Behavioral Account
arXiv:2608.30067v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How do LLM agents come to both understand environments they act in and master tasks set within them? Through controlled experiments combining world-model training (next-state prediction) and policy training (reward maximization), we investigate this question. We dissect the resulting models through their additive parameter updates. Geometrically, we find effective world-model updates are low-rank and share an input-feature subspace with policy updates while writing to nearly orthogonal output directions, whether trained separately or sequentially. However, we find that, in projection interventions, the sequential update induces more robustness than separate policy RL when removing the world model's leading input directions, suggesting that it has learned alternative input pathways. Behaviorally, we find the sequentially trained agent explores a wider range of states and actions. Based on this, we ask: does policy training preserve world knowledge as well as it could? We probe this with training-free merging built on the geometrically motivated input basis plus an online world-model loss during policy RL, and show both improve over the untreated baseline. Our findings suggest world knowledge and task-directed ability can be learned in geometrically complementary forms, and that future post-training pipelines should consider how best to engineer the interface between them.
Title:How do World Models and Policies Compose in LLM Agents? A Joint Spectral and Behavioral Account
Abstract:How do LLM agents come to both understand environments they act in and master tasks set within them? Through controlled experiments combining world-model training (next-state prediction) and policy training (reward maximization), we investigate this question. We dissect the resulting models through their additive parameter updates. Geometrically, we find effective world-model updates are low-rank and share an input-feature subspace with policy updates while writing to nearly orthogonal output directions, whether trained separately or sequentially. However, we find that, in projection interventions, the sequential update induces more robustness than separate policy RL when removing the world model's leading input directions, suggesting that it has learned alternative input pathways. Behaviorally, we find the sequentially trained agent explores a wider range of states and actions. Based on this, we ask: does policy training preserve world knowledge as well as it could? We probe this with training-free merging built on the geometrically motivated input basis plus an online world-model loss during policy RL, and show both improve over the untreated baseline. Our findings suggest world knowledge and task-directed ability can be learned in geometrically complementary forms, and that future post-training pipelines should consider how best to engineer the interface between them.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2608.30067 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.30067v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30067 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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