# From Masks to Worlds: A Hitchhiker's Guide to World Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 108 of its 119 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for language agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-language-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 108)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [How Far Are Surgeons from Surgical World Models? A Pilot Study on Zero-shot Surgical Video Generation with Expert Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01775/) (2025)
- [RecTok: Reconstruction Distillation along Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13421/) (2025)
- [Masked Diffusion Language Models are Strong and Steerable Text-Based World Models for Agentic RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16204/) (2026)
- [HelloWorld: Enabling Socially Interactive Characters in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05070/) (2026)
- [Discrete Diffusion Bridges for Spatiotemporally Aligned Image Translation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29997/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This is not a typical survey of world models; it is a guide for those who want to build worlds. We do not aim to catalog every paper that has ever mentioned a ``world model". Instead, we follow one clear road: from early masked models that unified representation learning across modalities, to unified architectures that share a single paradigm, then to interactive generative models that close the action-perception loop, and finally to memory-augmented systems that sustain consistent worlds over time. We bypass loosely related branches to focus on the core: the generative heart, the interactive loop, and the memory system. We show that this is the most promising path towards true world models.