The Global Neural World Model: Spatially Grounded Discrete Topologies for Action-Conditioned Planning
This work addresses the challenges of manifold drift and inadequate spatial structure representation in autoregressive prediction for continuous environment modeling. To overcome these issues, the authors propose a self-stabilizing, action-conditioned Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) that maps the environment onto a discrete two-dimensional grid. By incorporating translation-equivariant constraints and a grid “snapping” mechanism, the model achieves structured world representation. A topological quantization strategy based on balanced continuous entropy regularization is introduced to embed error correction directly into the latent space, thereby mitigating manifold drift. Furthermore, maximum-entropy exploration encourages learning of generalizable dynamics rather than memorizing trajectories. Experiments demonstrate that the model functions effectively as both a spatial physics simulator and a causal discovery system across passive observation, active control, and abstract sequential tasks, successfully constructing structured topological maps.