Baba in Wonderland: Online Self-Supervised Dynamics Discovery for Executable World Models

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 16 May 2026] Baba in Wonderland: Online Self-Supervised Dynamics Discovery for Executable World Models SeungWon Seo, DongHeun Han, SeongRae Noh, HyeongYeop Kang Executable world models can be read, edited, executed, and reused for planning, but only if the program captures the environment's transition law rather than semantic shortcuts in its surface vocabulary. We study online executable world-model learning under prior misalignment, where an agent must induce state-dependent dynamics from interaction evidence alone, without rule descriptions, reward signals, or trustworthy lexical priors. We introduce Alice, a closed-loop system that treats failed candidate updates as structural signal: when a candidate explains a new transition but loses previously explained ones, the preservation conflict reveals dynamics that the current program had conflated. Alice refines these conflicts into hypothesis classes that both provide compact, class-stratified preservation counterexamples for update and guide frontier exploration toward transitions that are novel and underrepresented with respect to the current program. We evaluate Alice on Baba in Wonderland, a prior-misaligned variant of Baba Is You that preserves simulator dynamics while replacing semantically meaningful rule-property labels with unrelated words. Experiments show that Alice substantially improves executable world-model learning under prior misalignment, and ablations show that both class refinement and class-aware exploration contribute. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16725 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16725v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16725 Focus to learn more Submission history From: HyeongYeop Kang [view email] [v1] Sat, 16 May 2026 00:18:22 UTC (2,298 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)