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This research identifies critical failure modes in latent world models where partial observability obscures safety-critical data, leading to control failures in robotic tasks. The authors propose specific diagnostics and mitigation strategies, such as privileged multimodal supervision and conformal risk calibration, which demonstrably improve safety on hardware despite introducing increased conservativeness. For practitioners, the key takeaway is that relying solely on high-dimensional observations is insufficient for safe control unless the latent representation explicitly preserves necessary safety information.
How Well Do Latent World Models Understand Partially Observable Safety Constraints?
arXiv:2510.06492v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent world models are a promising approach for learning state representations and dynamics directly from high-dimensional observations, enabling robot control in hard-to-model settings. However, control performance ultimately depends on the latent representation encoding the required information for the task. In this work, we study latent-space safe control problems and show how partial observability can induce control failures when safety-relevant information is not preserved in the latent state. Specifically, we identify two world model failure modes: estimation gaps, where current observations do not reveal safety-critical quantities (e.g., temperature in a cooking task), and prediction gaps, where failures are observable once they occur but cannot be reliably anticipated from available observations. We introduce two diagnostics for these gaps: a mutual-information-based measure of safety observability and a rollout-based measure of future safety predictability. Finally, we present mitigation strategies for each failure mode: privileged multimodal supervision for estimation gaps and conformal risk calibration for prediction gaps. Across two hardware case studies -- using unimodal RGB world models and multimodal RGB+Tactile and RGB+Thermal variants -- we show that these mitigation strategies improve the safety of a Franka Research 3 manipulator on challenging cooking tasks under partial observability, albeit with increased conservativeness. More broadly, our work raises the question of when world model state representations are sufficient for reliable robot control
Title:How Well Do Latent World Models Understand Partially Observable Safety Constraints?
Abstract:Latent world models are a promising approach for learning state representations and dynamics directly from high-dimensional observations, enabling robot control in hard-to-model settings. However, control performance ultimately depends on the latent representation encoding the required information for the task. In this work, we study latent-space safe control problems and show how partial observability can induce control failures when safety-relevant information is not preserved in the latent state. Specifically, we identify two world model failure modes: estimation gaps, where current observations do not reveal safety-critical quantities (e.g., temperature in a cooking task), and prediction gaps, where failures are observable once they occur but cannot be reliably anticipated from available observations. We introduce two diagnostics for these gaps: a mutual-information-based measure of safety observability and a rollout-based measure of future safety predictability. Finally, we present mitigation strategies for each failure mode: privileged multimodal supervision for estimation gaps and conformal risk calibration for prediction gaps. Across two hardware case studies -- using unimodal RGB world models and multimodal RGB+Tactile and RGB+Thermal variants -- we show that these mitigation strategies improve the safety of a Franka Research 3 manipulator on challenging cooking tasks under partial observability, albeit with increased conservativeness. More broadly, our work raises the question of when world model state representations are sufficient for reliable robot control
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2510.06492 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2510.06492v2 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.06492 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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