RoleWorld: Knowledge Transfer in World Modeling with Functional Role Abstractions

Abstract

World models enable large language model (LLM) agents to anticipate action effects and make informed decisions. For generalization, it is desirable for such world models to transfer efficiently to new environments with similar interaction structure and underlying dynamics. Recent approaches encode world dynamics as symbolic rules or executable programs, whose compositional structure in principle affords transfer, but still organize such knowledge around environment-specific objects. To address this limitation, we introduce RoleWorld, a symbolic world modeling approach which uses reusable prototypes and environment-specific parameter values as functional role abstractions to represent how objects behave in interactions. From interaction trajectories, a teacher LLM extracts role prototypes and executable transition rules defined over role instances, together with a skill that guides the actor LLM to use role information in decision making. In a target world, without the teacher, the actor uses this skill together with its current role assignments and parameter estimates, and actively tests a role instance hypothesis through interaction when its uncertainty affects the current decision. Feedback from each action refines role assignments and estimates parameter values online, with no LLM parameter updates and the transition rules held fixed. Experiments on MARS benchmark show that RoleWorld enables robust generalization across environments with significantly altered object behavior, suggesting that functional role abstractions can serve as an effective component for knowledge transfer in world modeling. Project Page: https://future-item.github.io/RoleWorld.