PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09030v2
• Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:39:15 GMT
• Title: PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play
• Abstract summary: We present PlayWorld, a simple, scalable, and fully autonomous pipeline for training high-fidelity video world simulators from interaction experience.<n>PlayWorld is the first system capable of learning entirely from unsupervised robot self-play, enabling naturally scalable data collection.<n> Experiments show that PlayWorld generates high-quality, physically consistent predictions for contact-rich interactions that are not captured by world models trained on human-collected data.
• Score: 8.710835027281465
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Action-conditioned video models offer a promising path to building general-purpose robot simulators that can improve directly from data. Yet, despite training on large-scale robot datasets, current state-of-the-art video models still struggle to predict physically consistent robot-object interactions that are crucial in robotic manipulation. To close this gap, we present PlayWorld, a simple, scalable, and fully autonomous pipeline for training high-fidelity video world simulators from interaction experience. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on success-biased human demonstrations, PlayWorld is the first system capable of learning entirely from unsupervised robot self-play, enabling naturally scalable data collection while capturing complex, long-tailed physical interactions essential for modeling realistic object dynamics. Experiments across diverse manipulation tasks show that PlayWorld generates high-quality, physically consistent predictions for contact-rich interactions that are not captured by world models trained on human-collected data. We further demonstrate the versatility of PlayWorld in enabling fine-grained failure prediction and policy evaluation, with up to 40% improvements over human-collected data. Finally, we demonstrate how PlayWorld enables reinforcement learning in the world model, improving policy performance by 65% in success rates when deployed in the real world.

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