# Mind the Execution Gap: Action-Semantic Mismatch in World-Model Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06582/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World model security and GUI agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 8 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [World model security and GUI agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-model-security-and-gui-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [Acting in Delayed Environments with Non-Stationary Markov Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11992/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Robot Execution with Masked Action Chunking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20130/) (2026)
- [FutureRTC: Real-Time Robot Execution with Anticipatory-Conditioned Action Chunking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24008/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14411/) (2025)
- [World Models Under Asynchronous Sensor Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07299/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World-model controllers rely on action-conditioned dynamics for prediction and planning, yet real control systems often execute commands asynchronously due to communication delay, packet loss, reordering, and actuator buffering. We study how asynchronous execution changes the action semantics assumed within world-model controllers, rather than treating it only as an external control disturbance. Through controlled interventions, we identify two architecture-dependent failure modes: planning-based controllers such as TD-MPC2 suffer from a future-action timeline mismatch between imagined and executed action sequences, while recurrent world models such as DreamerV3 can attribute observed transitions to commands that were not actually applied. Our analysis shows that TD-MPC2 requires the correct future action sequence during latent dynamics rollout, whereas DreamerV3 requires timely attribution of each transition to the action that generated it. Based on these findings, we introduce two lightweight execution-consistent interfaces, Future-Sequence for TD-MPC2 and Applied-Action Feedback for DreamerV3, that correct these mismatches without modifying the pretrained world models. Experiments across delays, packet loss, reordering, multiple control domains, measured network traces, and a process-separated asynchronous stack consistently support both diagnoses and the corresponding architecture-specific corrections.