Did the Grid Erase the Event? EndoClock for Auditing Medical World-Model Pipelines
On the map: World models → Medical and surgical world models
Abstract (arXiv)
Medical world models commonly learn from multimodal recordings synchronized onto a fixed-rate grid. This preprocessing resamples each native stream onto a shared time axis. Each stream has an observation clock that governs when observations are emitted or updated. When this clock depends on the latent or acquisition state, it is endogenous. In such settings, synchronization may not be neutral and can erase task-relevant evidence before the model sees the data. We introduce a four-regime taxonomy that characterizes where the evidence needed to distinguish a target event or state survives. The relevant witness may remain in the sampled values, in grid-cell update patterns, in native timing, or only in an external acquisition channel. EndoClock operationalizes this taxonomy as a conservative pretraining audit. It reports the lowest witness-bearing representation supported by the available evidence, or unresolved when no regime can be established. We illustrate this failure in echocardiography, where B-mode video write-outs cease during pulsed-wave Doppler acquisition while the corresponding measurement events remain recorded only in an external acquisition log. This work is a preliminary failure alert and executable audit. Its practical message is to preserve the native observation process long enough to determine whether synchronization has erased information required by the intended task.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and surgical world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2026.
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12 of 19 references.
References · 12
- 2018Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixelscited by 1,221
- 2018Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolutioncited by 761
- 2016Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Valuescited by 548
- 2020Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Seriescited by 501
- 2024Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Videocited by 490
- 2021Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Seriescited by 234
- 2020Learning from Irregularly-Sampled Time Series: A Missing Data Perspectivecited by 40
- 2023Feature-Conditioned Cascaded Video Diffusion Models for Precise Echocardiogram Synthesiscited by 32
- 2023Multimodal Machine Learning in Image-Based and Clinical Biomedicine: Survey and Prospectscited by 15
- 2016Causal Discovery from Subsampled Time Series Data by Constraint Optimizationcited by 12
- 2024CoReEcho: Continuous Representation Learning for 2D+time Echocardiography Analysiscited by 8
- 2026MRI Contrast Enhancement Kinetics World Modelcited by 4
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- 2025Echo-CoPilot: A Multiple-Perspective Agentic Framework for Reliable Echocardiography Interpretation
- 2026ReplayLens: Auditing Agents' Use of Outcomes
- 2026MedStreamBench: A Time-Aware Benchmark for Streaming and Proactive Medical Video Understanding
- 2025TIMER: Temporal Instruction Modeling and Evaluation for Longitudinal Clinical Records
- 2026When Evidence Changes: Evaluating Memory Repair and Re-reading in Language-Model Agents