Four Principles for Physically Interpretable World Models

As autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and uncertain settings, there is a growing need for trustworthy world models that can reliably predict future high-dimensional observations. The learned latent representations in world models lack direct mapping to meaningful physical quantities and dynamics, limiting their utility and interpretability in downstream planning, control, and safety verification. In this paper, we argue for a fundamental shift from physically informed to physically interpretable world models - and crystallize four principles that leverage symbolic knowledge to achieve these ends: (1) functionally organizing the latent space according to the physical intent, (2) learning aligned invariant and equivariant representations of the physical world, (3) integrating multiple forms and strengths of supervision into a unified training process, and (4) partitioning generative outputs to support scalability and verifiability. We experimentally demonstrate the value of each principle on two benchmarks. This paper opens several intriguing research directions to achieve and capitalize on full physical interpretability in world models.