From Masks to Worlds: A Hitchhiker's Guide to World Models

Jinbin Bai, Yu Lei, Hecong Wu, Yuchen Zhu, Shufan Li, Yi Xin, Xiangtai Li, Molei Tao, Aditya Grover, Ming-Hsuan Yang

From Masks to Worlds: A Hitchhiker's Guide to World Models: 8 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #20 of 28 papers on 2025-10-24. Day-by-day upvote history.

This is not a typical survey of world models; it is a guide for those who want to build worlds. We do not aim to catalog every paper that has ever mentioned a ``world model". Instead, we follow one clear road: from early masked models that unified representation learning across modalities, to unified architectures that share a single paradigm, then to interactive generative models that close the action-perception loop, and finally to memory-augmented systems that sustain consistent worlds over time. We bypass loosely related branches to focus on the core: the generative heart, the interactive loop, and the memory system. We show that this is the most promising path towards true world models.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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