Composition of Memory Experts for Diffusion World Models
On the map: World models → Latent predictive world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World models aim to predict plausible futures consistent with past observations, a capability central to planning and decision-making in reinforcement learning. Yet, existing architectures face a fundamental memory trade-off: transformers preserve local detail but are bottlenecked by quadratic attention, while recurrent and state-space models scale more efficiently but compress history at the cost of fidelity. To overcome this trade-off, we suggest decoupling future-past consistency from any single architecture and instead leveraging a set of specialized experts. We introduce a diffusion-based framework that integrates heterogeneous memory models through a contrastive product-of-experts formulation. Our approach instantiates three complementary roles: a short-term memory expert that captures fine local dynamics, a long-term memory expert that stores episodic history in external diffusion weights via lightweight test-time finetuning, and a spatial long-term memory expert that enforces geometric and spatial coherence. This compositional design avoids mode collapse and scales to long contexts without incurring a quadratic cost. Across simulated and real-world benchmarks, our method improves temporal consistency, recall of past observations, and navigation performance, establishing a novel paradigm for building and operating memory-augmented diffusion world models.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Latent predictive world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 53 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.
Builds on
53 of 59 references.
References · 53
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38 more
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- 2025On Memory: A comparison of memory mechanisms in world models
- 2026Coarse-to-Fine Compositional Diffusion for Long-Horizon Planning
- 2025EDELINE: Enhancing Memory in Diffusion-based World Models via Linear-Time Sequence Modeling
- 2026MemoWM: How World Models Change What Agents Need to Remember
- 2026HaM-World: Soft-Hamiltonian World Models with Selective Memory for Planning
- 2026BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models
- 2025Zero-shot World Models via Search in Memory
- 2026Compositional Visual Planning via Inference-Time Diffusion Scaling