Rollout-Decoded Reconstruction for Long-Horizon Prediction in Latent World Models

A latent world model trains its decoder on latents anchored to observations, then deploys it on the model's own free-running rollout, hundreds of steps past the last observation. Rollout-Decoded Reconstruction (RDR) closes this gap with a single loss term that free-runs the model during training exactly as evaluation will, decodes every rollout latent, and penalizes reconstruction error against ground truth. The term adds no parameters, costs training-time compute only, and reduces to the standard objective at weight zero, so every comparison in this paper is a one-flag A/B. On the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, RDR raises valid prediction time (the time to first crossing of normalized error 0.5) from 3.87 ± 0.23 to 6.97 ± 0.42 time units at an identical 193,568 parameters, a 1.80× improvement confirmed on seeds never used in selection and holding in 10 of 10 preregistered configurations at ratios of 1.71-2.50×. The results come from a single system; a sweep in which the advantage grows with latent width is descriptive, and control experiments on two classic tasks are preliminary.