Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation — Paper

Abstract

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

Authors 2

Anqi Peter Li, Kaden Kim

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10954
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10954
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
Categories: cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10954
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
Primary category: cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 46 min agohigh

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9

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T19

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46 min ago

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Authors: Anqi Peter Li, Kaden Kim

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.LG	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperMeasuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation
New paper: Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation
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Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	46 min ago	1

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