arXiv — Machine Learning · · 3 min read

World Model-Enabled Causal Digital Twins for Semantic Communications in Physical AI Systems

Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.16547 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]

Title:World Model-Enabled Causal Digital Twins for Semantic Communications in Physical AI Systems

View a PDF of the paper titled World Model-Enabled Causal Digital Twins for Semantic Communications in Physical AI Systems, by Lingyi Wang and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling goal-oriented networking. However, most existing semantic communication solutions are tailored to one-shot tasks and optimize instantaneous performance. Hence, they cannot be used to support closed-loop dynamic systems with physical artificial intelligence (AI), in which the transmitted semantics affect not only the current inference outcome but also future control actions, state evolution, and ultimately long-horizon task performance. To address this gap, this paper investigates goal-oriented semantic communications for physical AI systems with closed-loop sensing-communication-inference-control. In particular, the problem of semantic communications is formulated as a long-term return-per-bit maximization under wireless bit-budget constraints while capturing both control efficiency and communication efficiency. To solve this problem, a novel causal information value (CIV) metric is introduced to evaluate the marginal contribution of each semantic token to the expected long-term return by transmission interventions. Then, a world-model-enabled causal digital twin (WM-CDT) framework is proposed to capture the dynamics of closed-loop physical AI systems and enable counterfactual reasoning for long-horizon imagined rollouts. Based on these imagined rollouts, an actor-critic policy is trained for long-horizon agent control with high data efficiency, while the semantic token selector is trained through CIV-per-bit evaluation. Extensive simulations on an AirSim-Sionna-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation simulator show that the proposed WM-CDT framework achieves significant improvement in return-per-kbit and navigation success rate compared to existing reinforcement learning solutions.
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.16547 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2605.16547v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16547
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Lingyi Wang [view email]
[v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 18:41:51 UTC (5,841 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled World Model-Enabled Causal Digital Twins for Semantic Communications in Physical AI Systems, by Lingyi Wang and 3 other authors
  • View PDF
  • HTML (experimental)
  • TeX Source

Current browse context:

cs.LG
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
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

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
IArxiv recommender toggle
IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — Machine Learning