Peter Stone's Selected Publications

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Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations

Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations.
Zizhao Wang, Kaixin Wang, Li Zhao, Peter Stone, and Jiang Bian.
In Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), December 2025.

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Abstract

World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on object-centric rather than monolithic representations, with the goal of more effectively capturing environment dynamics and enhancing compositional generalization. However, the development of object-centric world models has largely been explored in environments with limited visual complexity (such as basic geometries). It remains underexplored whether such models can be effective in more challenging settings. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing Dyn-O, an enhanced structured world model built upon object-centric representations. Compared to prior work in object-centric representations, Dyn-O improves in both learning representations and modeling dynamics. On the challenging Procgen games, we demonstrate that our method can learn object-centric world models directly from pixel observations, outperforming DreamerV3 in rollout prediction accuracy. Furthermore, by decoupling object centric features into dynamic-agnostic and dynamic-aware components, we enable finer-grained manipulation of these features and generate more diverse imagined trajectories. The code of Dyn-O can be found at: https://github.com/wangzizhao/dyn-O.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{dyno_neurips2025,
  author   = {Zizhao Wang and Kaixin Wang and Li Zhao and Peter Stone and Jiang Bian},
  title    = {Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations},
  booktitle = {Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year     = {2025},
  month    = {December},
  location = {San Diego, United States},
  abstract = {World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on object-centric rather than monolithic representations, with the goal of more effectively capturing environment dynamics and enhancing compositional generalization. However, the development of object-centric world models has largely been explored in environments with limited visual complexity (such as basic geometries). It remains underexplored whether such models can be effective in more challenging settings. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing Dyn-O, an enhanced structured world model built upon object-centric representations. Compared to prior work in object-centric representations, Dyn-O improves in both learning representations and modeling dynamics. On the challenging Procgen games, we demonstrate that our method can learn object-centric world models directly from pixel observations, outperforming DreamerV3 in rollout prediction accuracy. Furthermore, by decoupling object centric features into dynamic-agnostic and dynamic-aware components, we enable finer-grained manipulation of these features and generate more diverse imagined trajectories. The code of Dyn-O can be found at: https://github.com/wangzizhao/dyn-O.},
}

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