World Model Interpretability: From Decoding Representations to Understanding Latent Worlds

World Model Interpretability. From Decoding Representations to Understanding Latent Worlds. By Jize Wang and five others, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanyang Technological University. Published on the eighteenth of October. Its code repository is a placeholder: a readme, and nothing to run yet.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures, known as JEPAs, are growing beyond representation learning. They are turning into latent world models that support prediction, planning and control. But the latent worlds they build come with no interface a human can read. This piece is written as a Perspective, and its argument is that interpretability has to change along with the models. Once JEPA latents become the internal states used for prediction and action, it is no longer enough to ask what they encode. The questions become how latent variables interact, how they evolve, and how they causally drive prediction.

To guide that shift, the authors lay out a research agenda in four stages. Ground. Structure. Verify. Act. The stages are named rather than spelled out one by one, but the order carries the argument. It runs from grounding what the latents are, through the structure among latent variables, to verifying what causally drives prediction, and finally to acting on the latent world. Each step asks more of our understanding than the one before it. The direction matches the shift the authors call for: from what is encoded, toward how latent variables interact, evolve, and cause.

Placed on that map, existing interpretability work on JEPAs offers early evidence for the first stage, Ground. The later stages are where the field is thin. Systematic analysis of latent structure, causal verification, and intervention all remain largely unexplored.

The Perspective is a call to widen the agenda. The goal it sets is to move attention away from decoding representations, and toward understanding, validating and acting on the latent worlds these models carry.