https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2506.01622/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44410485urn:hackerpapers:mention:2506.01622:44410485Sun, 29 Jun 2025 05:02:46 GMT<p>This paper argues the opposite https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01622 Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of generalizing to multi-step goal-directed tasks must have learned a predictive model of its environment. We show that this model can be extracted from the agent&#x27;s policy, and that increasing the agents performance or the complexity of the goals it can achieve requires learning increasingly accurate world models. This has a number of…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2506.01622/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.AI