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Hallucination in World Models is Predictable and Preventable

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.27326 (cs)
[Submitted on 25 Jun 2026]

Title:Hallucination in World Models is Predictable and Preventable

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Abstract:Modern generative world models render increasingly realistic action-controllable futures, yet they frequently hallucinate: rollouts remain visually fluent while drifting from the ground-truth dynamics. We hypothesize that hallucination concentrates in low-coverage regions of the state-action space, where lightweight data-centric signals can both detect it and guide mitigation. To test this, we introduce MMBench2, a 427-hour, 210-task dataset for visual world modeling with ground-truth actions, rewards, and live simulators, and train a 350M-parameter world model on it. We identify three distinct hallucination modes: perceptual, action-marginalized, and scene-diverging -- each anchored to a different stage of the pipeline, and develop three signals that accurately predict where the model will fail. To close coverage gaps at training time, we develop a coverage-aware sampling technique; to close them online, our hallucination predictors serve as curiosity rewards for targeted data collection, yielding a data-efficient finetuning recipe that adapts the pretrained world model to entirely unseen environments with as few as 50 real environment trajectories. Overall, our findings reveal that hallucination in world models is inherently a data coverage issue, and that the same signals used to detect it can also be used for mitigation.
An interactive web version of our paper is available at this https URL
Comments: Interactive paper, live demo, code, dataset, and models: this https URL
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.27326 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2606.27326v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27326
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Nicklas Hansen [view email]
[v1] Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:38:45 UTC (4,329 KB)
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