World Action Verifier: Self-Improving World Models via Forward-Inverse Asymmetry

Abstract: General-purpose world models promise scalable policy evaluation, optimization, and planning, yet achieving the required level of robustness remains challenging. Unlike policy learning which primarily focuses on optimal actions, a world model needs to be reliable over a vast space of suboptimal actions, which are often underrepresented in action-labeled robot interactions. To address this challenge, we propose World Action Verifier (WAV), a framework that enables world models to identify their own prediction errors and self-improve. The key idea is to decompose action-conditioned state prediction into two independently verifiable factors: state plausibility and action reachability. We show that verifying these factors is significantly more tractable than direct forward prediction due to two underlying asymmetries: the broader availability of action-free data and the lower dimensionality of action-relevant features. Leveraging these asymmetries, we augment a world model with (i) a diverse subgoal generator obtained from video corpora and (ii) a sparse inverse model that infers actions from a subset of state features. By enforcing cycle consistency among proposed subgoals, inferred actions, and forward rollouts, WAV provides an effective verification mechanism in under-explored regimes, where existing methods often fail. Across nine tasks spanning MiniGrid, RoboMimic, and ManiSkill, our method achieves 2x higher sample efficiency while improving downstream policy performance by over 22%.