Abstract
Latent world models that integrate a flow in a frozen self supervised latent space train stably and cheaply, yet silently lose the property manipulation depends on most: motion. The pretrained flow never moves the manipulated object; retraining it with latent-only losses only trades stillness for teleport-like motion. We trace the failure to the training signal, not the representation: anchor-sparse, latent-only supervision never says where along the horizon change belongs. Decode-augmented rollout training (DART) repairs this while keeping the representation frozen, retraining only the flow with decode-path supervision. DART outperforms its latent only parent on the full protocol, restores the temporal structure of motion, and re-couples predicted motion to the scene; at larger scale it further improves prediction quality, closing nearly half the remaining gap to an oracle-informed interpolation reference. Finally, we report an unexpected finding about evaluation: pixel error alone rewards frozen predictions.
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Chen, X., Li, R. Z., Zhou, Z., Zhu, X., & Liu, H. (2026). Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model
MLA 9
Chen, Xiwen, et al. "Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model.
Chicago (author–date)
Chen, Xiwen, Rigaudiere Z. Li, Zhiruo Zhou, Xiaojun Zhu, and Houde Liu. 2026. "Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model.
Harvard
Chen, X., Li, R. Z., Zhou, Z., Zhu, X. and Liu, H. (2026) 'Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model.
Vancouver
Chen X, Li RZ, Zhou Z, Zhu X, Liu H. Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model
IEEE
X. Chen, R. Z. Li, Z. Zhou, X. Zhu, and H. Liu, "Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/frozen-flows-forget-diagnosing-and-restoring-lost-motion-in-a-latent-flow-world-model.