World Models as Reference Trajectories for Rapid Motor Adaptation

Deploying learned control policies in real-world environments poses a fundamental challenge. When system dynamics change unexpectedly, performance degrades until models are retrained on new data. We introduce Reflexive World Models (RWM), a dual control framework that uses world model predictions as implicit reference trajectories for rapid adaptation. Our method separates the control problem into long-term reward maximization through reinforcement learning and robust motor execution through rapid latent control. This dual architecture achieves significantly faster adaptation with low online computational cost compared to model-based RL baselines, while maintaining near-optimal performance. The approach combines the benefits of flexible policy learning through reinforcement learning with rapid error correction capabilities, providing a principled approach to maintaining performance in high-dimensional continuous control tasks under varying dynamics.

@article{brito2025_2505.15589,
  title={ World Models as Reference Trajectories for Rapid Motor Adaptation },
  author={ Carlos Stein Brito and Daniel McNamee },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15589},
  year={ 2025 }
}