Before We Adapt: The Zero-Shot Generalization Bottleneck in Continual World Models

arXiv:2610.41041v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) requires agents to operate under environmental changes while reusing prior knowledge whenever possible. We argue that model-based reinforcement learning provides a promising framework for this setting because learned world models (WMs) can, in principle, support change detection, knowledge reuse, adaptation, and acquisition of new knowledge. However, such benefits depend heavily on whether the learned model can generalize beyond the contexts in which it was trained. In this work, we propose to formulate this problem with a contextual Markov decision process in which context is decomposed into behavioral and physical components.