Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models

The concept of world models has garnered significant attention due to advancements in multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 and video generation models such as Sora, which are central to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the literature on world models. Generally, world models are regarded as tools for either understanding the present state of the world or predicting its future dynamics. This review presents a systematic categorization of world models, emphasizing two primary functions: (1) constructing internal representations to understand the mechanisms of the world, and (2) predicting future states to simulate and guide decision-making. Initially, we examine the current progress in these two categories. We then explore the application of world models in key domains, including autonomous driving, robotics, and social simulacra, with a focus on how each domain utilizes these aspects. Finally, we outline key challenges and provide insights into potential future research directions.

Tabular Data Synthesis with Differential Privacy: A Survey

Data sharing is a prerequisite for collaborative innovation, enabling organizations to leverage diverse datasets for deeper insights. In real-world applications like FinTech and Smart Manufacturing, transactional data, often in tabular form, are generated and analyzed for insight generation. However, such datasets typically contain sensitive personal/business information, raising privacy concerns and regulatory risks. Data synthesis tackles this by generating artificial datasets that preserve the statistical characteristics of real data, removing direct links to individuals. However, attackers can still infer sensitive information using background knowledge. Differential privacy offers a solution by providing provable and quantifiable privacy protection. Consequently, differentially private data synthesis has emerged as a promising approach to privacy-aware data sharing. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of existing differentially private tabular data synthesis methods, highlighting the unique challenges of each generation model for generating tabular data under differential privacy constraints. We classify the methods into statistical and deep learning-based approaches based on their generation models, discussing them in both centralized and distributed environments. We evaluate and compare those methods within each category, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in terms of utility, privacy, and computational complexity. Additionally, we present and discuss various evaluation methods for assessing the quality of the synthesized data, identify research gaps in the field and directions for future research.

TrajAgent: An Agent Framework for Unified Trajectory Modelling

Trajectory modeling, which includes research on trajectory data pattern mining and future prediction, has widespread applications in areas such as life services, urban transportation, and public administration. Numerous methods have been proposed to address specific problems within trajectory modelling. However, due to the heterogeneity of data and the diversity of trajectory tasks, achieving unified trajectory modelling remains an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we propose TrajAgent, a large language model-based agentic framework, to unify various trajectory modelling tasks. In TrajAgent, we first develop UniEnv, an execution environment with a unified data and model interface, to support the execution and training of various models. Building on UniEnv, we introduce TAgent, an agentic workflow designed for automatic trajectory modelling across various trajectory tasks. Specifically, we design AutOpt, a systematic optimization module within TAgent, to further improve the performance of the integrated model. With diverse trajectory tasks input in natural language, TrajAgent automatically generates competitive results via training and executing appropriate models. Extensive experiments on four tasks using four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TrajAgent in unified trajectory modelling, achieving an average performance improvement of 15.43% over baseline methods.

Neural-Polyptych: Content Controllable Painting Recreation for Diverse Genres

To bridge the gap between artists and non-specialists, we present a unified framework, Neural-Polyptych, to facilitate the creation of expansive, high-resolution paintings by seamlessly incorporating interactive hand-drawn sketches with fragments from original paintings. We have designed a multi-scale GAN-based architecture to decompose the generation process into two parts, each responsible for identifying global and local features. To enhance the fidelity of semantic details generated from users' sketched outlines, we introduce a Correspondence Attention module utilizing our Reference Bank strategy. This ensures the creation of high-quality, intricately detailed elements within the artwork. The final result is achieved by carefully blending these local elements while preserving coherent global consistency. Consequently, this methodology enables the production of digital paintings at megapixel scale, accommodating diverse artistic expressions and enabling users to recreate content in a controlled manner. We validate our approach to diverse genres of both Eastern and Western paintings. Applications such as large painting extension, texture shuffling, genre switching, mural art restoration, and recomposition can be successfully based on our framework.

Online Event-Triggered Switching for Frequency Control in Power Grids with Variable Inertia

The increasing integration of renewable energy resources into power grids has led to time-varying system inertia and consequent degradation in frequency dynamics. A promising solution to alleviate performance degradation is using power electronics interfaced energy resources, such as renewable generators and battery energy storage for primary frequency control, by adjusting their power output set-points in response to frequency deviations. However, designing a frequency controller under time-varying inertia is challenging. Specifically, the stability or optimality of controllers designed for time-invariant systems can be compromised once applied to a time-varying system. We model the frequency dynamics under time-varying inertia as a nonlinear switching system, where the frequency dynamics under each mode are described by the nonlinear swing equations and different modes represent different inertia levels. We identify a key controller structure, named Neural Proportional-Integral (Neural-PI) controller, that guarantees exponential input-to-state stability for each mode. To further improve performance, we present an online event-triggered switching algorithm to select the most suitable controller from a set of Neural-PI controllers, each optimized for specific inertia levels. Simulations on the IEEE 39-bus system validate the effectiveness of the proposed online switching control method with stability guarantees and optimized performance for frequency control under time-varying inertia.

AgentMove: Predicting Human Mobility Anywhere Using Large Language Model based Agentic Framework

Human mobility prediction plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Although deep learning based models have shown promising results over the past decade, their reliance on extensive private mobility data for training and their inability to perform zero-shot predictions, have hindered further advancements. Recently, attempts have been made to apply large language models (LLMs) to mobility prediction task. However, their performance has been constrained by the absence of a systematic design of workflow. They directly generate the final output using LLMs, which limits the potential of LLMs to uncover complex mobility patterns and underestimates their extensive reserve of global geospatial knowledge. In this paper, we introduce AgentMove, a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized mobility prediction for any cities worldwide. In AgentMove, we first decompose the mobility prediction task into three sub-tasks and then design corresponding modules to complete these subtasks, including spatial-temporal memory for individual mobility pattern mining, world knowledge generator for modeling the effects of urban structure and collective knowledge extractor for capturing the shared patterns among population. Finally, we combine the results of three modules and conduct a reasoning step to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments on mobility data from two sources in 12 cities demonstrate that AgentMove outperforms the best baseline more than 8% in various metrics and it shows robust predictions with various LLMs as base and also less geographical bias across cities. Codes and data can be found in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/AgentMove.

LIMP: Large Language Model Enhanced Intent-aware Mobility Prediction

Human mobility prediction is essential for applications like urban planning and transportation management, yet it remains challenging due to the complex, often implicit, intentions behind human behavior. Existing models predominantly focus on spatiotemporal patterns, paying less attention to the underlying intentions that govern movements. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative research angle for integrating commonsense reasoning into mobility prediction. However, it is a non-trivial problem because LLMs are not natively built for mobility intention inference, and they also face scalability issues and integration difficulties with spatiotemporal models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LIMP (LLMs for Intent-ware Mobility Prediction) framework. Specifically, LIMP introduces an "Analyze-Abstract-Infer" (A2I) agentic workflow to unleash LLM's commonsense reasoning power for mobility intention inference. Besides, we design an efficient fine-tuning scheme to transfer reasoning power from commercial LLM to smaller-scale, open-source language model, ensuring LIMP's scalability to millions of mobility records. Moreover, we propose a transformer-based intention-aware mobility prediction model to effectively harness the intention inference ability of LLM. Evaluated on two real-world datasets, LIMP significantly outperforms baseline models, demonstrating improved accuracy in next-location prediction and effective intention inference. The interpretability of intention-aware mobility prediction highlights our LIMP framework's potential for real-world applications. Codes and data can be found in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LIMP .

FuXi Weather: An end-to-end machine learning weather data assimilation and forecasting system

Operational numerical weather prediction systems consist of three fundamental components: the global observing system for data collection, data assimilation for generating initial conditions, and the forecasting model to predict future weather conditions. While NWP have undergone a quiet revolution, with forecast skills progressively improving over the past few decades, their advancement has slowed due to challenges such as high computational costs and the complexities associated with assimilating an increasing volume of observational data and managing finer spatial grids. Advances in machine learning offer an alternative path towards more efficient and accurate weather forecasts. The rise of machine learning based weather forecasting models has also spurred the development of machine learning based DA models or even purely machine learning based weather forecasting systems. This paper introduces FuXi Weather, an end-to-end machine learning based weather forecasting system. FuXi Weather employs specialized data preprocessing and multi-modal data fusion techniques to integrate information from diverse sources under all-sky conditions, including microwave sounders from 3 polar-orbiting satellites and radio occultation data from Global Navigation Satellite System. Operating on a 6-hourly DA and forecasting cycle, FuXi Weather independently generates robust and accurate 10-day global weather forecasts at a spatial resolution of 0.25\textdegree. It surpasses the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts high-resolution forecasts in terms of predictability, extending the skillful forecast lead times for several key weather variables such as the geopotential height at 500 hPa from 9.25 days to 9.5 days. The system's high computational efficiency and robust performance, even with limited observations, demonstrates its potential as a promising alternative to traditional NWP systems.

UrbanWorld: An Urban World Model for 3D City Generation

Cities, as the most fundamental environment of human life, encompass diverse physical elements such as buildings, roads and vegetation with complex interconnection. Crafting realistic, interactive 3D urban environments plays a crucial role in constructing AI agents capable of perceiving, decision-making, and acting like humans in real-world environments. However, creating high-fidelity 3D urban environments usually entails extensive manual labor from designers, involving intricate detailing and accurate representation of complex urban features. Therefore, how to accomplish this in an automatical way remains a longstanding challenge. Toward this problem, we propose UrbanWorld, the first generative urban world model that can automatically create a customized, realistic and interactive 3D urban world with flexible control conditions. UrbanWorld incorporates four key stages in the automatical crafting pipeline: 3D layout generation from openly accessible OSM data, urban scene planning and designing with a powerful urban multimodal large language model (Urban MLLM), controllable urban asset rendering with advanced 3D diffusion techniques, and finally the MLLM-assisted scene refinement. The crafted high-fidelity 3D urban environments enable realistic feedback and interactions for general AI and machine perceptual systems in simulations. We are working on contributing UrbanWorld as an open-source and versatile platform for evaluating and improving AI abilities in perception, decision-making, and interaction in realistic urban environments.

Combining Neural Networks and Symbolic Regression for Analytical Lyapunov Function Discovery

We propose CoNSAL (Combining Neural networks and Symbolic regression for Analytical Lyapunov function) to construct analytical Lyapunov functions for nonlinear dynamic systems. This framework contains a neural Lyapunov function and a symbolic regression component, where symbolic regression is applied to distill the neural network to precise analytical forms. Our approach utilizes symbolic regression not only as a tool for translation but also as a means to uncover counterexamples. This procedure terminates when no counterexamples are found in the analytical formulation. Compared with previous results, our algorithm directly produces an analytical form of the Lyapunov function with improved interpretability in both the learning process and the final results. We apply our algorithm to 2-D inverted pendulum, path following, Van Der Pol Oscillator, 3-D trig dynamics, 4-D rotating wheel pendulum, 6-D 3-bus power system, and demonstrate that our algorithm successfully finds their valid Lyapunov functions.