Affordances Enable Partial World Modeling with LLMs

Full models of the world require complex knowledge of immense detail. While pre-trained large models have been hypothesized to contain similar knowledge due to extensive pre-training on vast amounts of internet scale data, using them directly in a search procedure is inefficient and inaccurate. Conversely, partial models focus on making high quality predictions for a subset of state and actions: those linked through affordances that achieve user intents~citepkhetarpal2020can. Can we posit large models as partial world models? We provide a formal answer to this question, proving that agents achieving task-agnostic, language-conditioned intents necessarily possess predictive partial-world models informed by affordances. In the multi-task setting, we introduce distribution-robust affordances and show that partial models can be extracted to significantly improve search efficiency. Empirical evaluations in tabletop robotics tasks demonstrate that our affordance-aware partial models reduce the search branching factor and achieve higher rewards compared to full world models.