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Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games (with 13 co-authors)

François Chollet · 17 Jul 2025 · arxiv.org

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In plain words

People adapt fast by quickly building mental models of how new places work, yet AI checks only look at fixed knowledge from big training sets. This opens concrete tests of whether machines can figure out brand-new rules through limited play the way people do. It is a perspective proposing suites of games with genuine hidden novelty as benchmarks, drawing on cognitive science and pushing past static model evaluations.

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François Chollet did not write this page.

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  1. We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction.
  2. However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment.
  3. We expect that building and evaluating AI systems capable of this kind of rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI capable of functioning effectively in the complex and fast-changing real world, and especially in human worlds - the environments that human beings have evolved in, created, and are continually changing and re-creating.
  4. For adaptation to complex and changing environments, an agent's world models cannot be static representations learned once and fixed.
  5. We contend that games provide particularly rich and controlled environments uniquely well-suited for systematically evaluating rapid model adaptation and the process of world model induction.