mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Three-in-One World Model: Energy-Based Consistency, Prediction, and Counterfactual Inference for Marketing Intervention

arXiv 2605.07199 ↗First posted 8 May 2026cs.AI cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: World models → World models for language agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Marketing decisions reflect the interaction of latent consumer heterogeneity, time-varying internal states, and explicit interventions, a structure that current prediction- and language-oriented models do not capture in a unified manner. We propose a Three-in-One world-model architecture in which a Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) learns a frozen belief representation from demographics, time, and lagged actions and outcomes, with lightweight task-specific adapters attached on top. The same belief supports three tasks within a single framework: (i) energy-based consistency evaluation through the DBM's free energy, (ii) outcome prediction through adapters, and (iii) counterfactual inference by holding the belief fixed and varying only the action input given to the adapter. Using a controlled simulation in which the latent price sensitivity, promotion responsiveness, and base preference of each consumer are known, we show that the adapters match a strong MLP baseline on visit- and purchase-AUC while recovering heterogeneous treatment effects substantially better than S-, T-, X-, and DR-learner meta-learners and a Causal Forest baseline built on the same raw features, with the largest gap on a confounded price-promotion intervention. Complementing this, free-energy clamps systematically penalize counterfactual purchase trajectories that lack prior promotional exposure, and the penalty itself depends on the latent base preference in the expected direction. These results indicate that DBM beliefs disentangle latent traits in a form that survives counterfactual queries, providing an integrated world-model substrate for marketing intervention.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 9 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

Builds on

9 of 54 references.

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Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024From Efficient Multimodal Models to World Models: A Survey27 Jun
  2. 2024Cognitively Inspired Energy-Based World Models13 Jun

Other references · 7

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
  3. 2018World Modelscited by 1,444
  4. 2024Learning and Leveraging World Models in Visual Representation Learningcited by 71
  5. 2015On Learning to Think: Algorithmic Information Theory for Novel Combinations of Reinforcement Learning Controllers and Recurrent Neural World Modelscited by 52
  6. 2024OpenCity: A Scalable Platform to Simulate Urban Activities with Massive LLM Agentscited by 35
  7. 2024Review-LLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Personalized Review Generationcited by 14

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2026Generative Augmented Inference of LLM-generated Data for Market Research: Theory and Empirical Evidence
  2. 2026Learning to Simulate Individuals from Macro Social Signals
  3. 2026The Mouth is Not the Brain: Bridging Energy-Based World Models and Language Generation
  4. 2026Large Behavior Model: A Promptable Digital Twin of the Retail Customer
  5. 2025How Do Consumers Really Choose: Exposing Hidden Preferences with the Mixture of Experts Model
  6. 2025Can Generative AI agents behave like humans? Evidence from laboratory market experiments
  7. 2026Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior
  8. 2026Causal-Aware Foundation-Model for Bilevel Optimization in Discrete Choice Settings