KAIST

< The research team. From left: Sungjin Ahn, Professor (KAIST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & School of Computing); Doojin Baek, Master >

A KAIST research team has developed a next-generation world model, an internal model an AI builds to understand and predict the world, that learns executable theories from observation alone.

KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on the 15th of July that a team led by Professor Sungjin Ahn from the School of Computing has proposed a new learning paradigm called Learning-to-Theorize (L2T), which trains AI to theorize how the world works using only observed information. The team also built the Neural Theorizer (NEO), a neural network-based model that implements this paradigm.

The research was selected for an oral presentation at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), held in Seoul from July 6 to 11, and was presented on July 9. This places it among the top 0.7 percent (168 papers) of the 23,918 total submissions. The paper was also selected for the Best Paper Award at the Compositional Learning Workshop.

World models are a foundational technology across robot control, autonomous driving, generative AI, and autonomous agents — AI systems capable of judging and acting on their own. Until now, world models have mainly focused on predicting what happens next. Even when a model predicts the next scene accurately, it doesn't necessarily understand why that change occurred — that is, the underlying principle governing the world.

< The award ceremony at the Compositional Learning Workshop, ICML 2026. NEO was selected and honored as the Best Paper Award. >

The team found a solution in how humans learn. Long before children acquire language, they build their own internal theories of how the world works. Applying this view from developmental cognitive science to AI, the researchers built a system that understands the principles behind the world, rather than one that simply predicts the future.

The team's proposed L2T framework provides no predetermined answers or rules. Given only a "before" and "after" observation, the AI discovers on its own which rule produced the change. While conventional AI models focus on "guessing what comes next," this approach is built to understand "why the change happened."

To implement this, the team also developed Neural Theorizier, NEO. The model discovers reusable primitives hidden within observed transformations and composes them into executable programs. These learned primitives can then be systematically recombined to explain new situations.

< Figure 1. Learning to Theorize (L2T) Framework. (a) Training data consists of observation pairs (x, y) generated by unobserved true programs. (b) Under L2T, the model learns to discover reusable primitives (Rotate, Left, Down, and Paint) and to compose them into executable theories. (c) Without L2T, the model instead memorizes entangled composite primitives (e.g., Left-Down) as indecomposed single units. (d) Once the model has learned to theorize, novel phenomena (e.g., Down-Paint-Rotate) can be explained by recombining learned primitives. (e) In contrast, memorized entangled representations fail to generalize to unseen programs. >

For example, NEO independently learns primitives corresponding to basic operations such as rotation, movement to the left or downward, and coloring. Even when presented with a combination it has never encountered during training, such as “move down, then color, then rotate”, it can recombine the primitives it has already learned to explain and solve the new situation.

Conventional AI, by contrast, tends to memorize entangled patterns as a single unit, so its performance drops sharply when faced with an unfamiliar combination. Through a range of experiments, the team demonstrated that NEO outperforms existing approaches in compositional generalization, the ability to combine learned basic rules to solve problems never seen before.

"It points to a new direction beyond prediction-centric world models, what we call a 'World Theory Model.' We expect this to develop into a core technology across fields including intelligent robots, autonomous agents, and AI that supports scientific discovery." said Professor Sungjin Ahn.

Master's students Doojin Baek and Gyubin Lee from the School of Computing served as co-first authors on the study.

Paper title: Learning to Theorize the World from Observation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.03413

Authors: Doojin Baek*, Gyubin Lee*, Junyeob Baek, Hosung Lee, Sungjin Ahn (*Co-first authors)

The research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).