Neural Fields as World Models

Abstract:Humans rehearse possible futures offline, as in mental practice and perhaps dreaming, suggesting that world models may support task learning away from the environment. Standard machine learning world models compress visual input into latent vectors, discarding the spatial structure that characterizes sensory cortex. We propose isomorphic world models: architectures that preserve sensory topology, so physics prediction becomes geometric propagation rather than abstract state transition. We implement this idea with motor-gated neural fields, where activity evolves through local lateral connectivity and motor commands multiplicatively modulate specific channels. Across three experiments, the same architecture learns ballistic prediction without ``teleporting,'' improves a catching policy offline by propagating task error through a frozen learned world model, and develops body-selective motor channels without body labels. These results provide preliminary evidence that physical prediction, offline task learning, and body-linked representation share a common computational substrate: action-conditional prediction within a spatial map.

6 pages, 6 figures. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2026)

Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2602.18690 [q-bio.NC]

(or arXiv:2602.18690v2 [q-bio.NC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.18690 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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