yann-lecun-f116020d·2 events·first seen Aliases: Yann LeCun
A new arXiv preprint reframes the LLM-vs-world-model debate by arguing that LLMs are a degenerate special case of world models rather than a fundamentally different paradigm, with the state space being token sequences and the only action being token appending. The paper maps a continuous spectrum from next-token prediction through multi-token prediction, future-summary prediction, and next-latent prediction up to JEPA-style architectures. It identifies two open research challenges in moving along this spectrum: the data cliff from self-supervised text to action-labeled environments, and whether transformers generalize to continuous-state prediction or require a new architectural primitive. The work directly engages with Yann LeCun's 2022 argument that general intelligence requires abandoning autoregressive prediction.
Researchers from Berkeley, Meta, and collaborators introduce GRASP, a gradient-based planner designed to make long-horizon planning with learned world models more robust. The method addresses three core failure modes: ill-conditioned computation graphs from backpropagation through time, non-greedy loss landscapes with many local minima, and brittle gradients through high-dimensional vision models. GRASP lifts trajectory optimization into virtual states for parallel optimization across time, injects stochasticity into state iterates for exploration, and reshapes gradients to avoid problematic state-input gradient paths. The work is positioned in the context of scaling world models toward general-purpose simulators usable for control and planning.