Learning Goal-Conditioned Subgoals through Frozen Hierarchical World Models

Overview & Synopsis

Hierarchical world models plan over long horizons by passing predicted states from a coarse model to a lower-level controller. Choosing these states can be expensive: the upper-level planner repeatedly differentiates through candidate macro-action trajectories. We replace this search with a lightweight goal-conditioned network trained through the frozen high-level predictor. The network supplies a conditioning vector, while the predictor generates the next latent waypoint. Training uses hindsight goals and state-prediction losses on offline trajectories, without search-solution targets or macro-action labels. Inference retains an autoregressive high-level rollout, but requires no high-level candidate optimization. We evaluate this approach on the shared-latent HWM checkpoints distributed with H-JEPA, using three backbone seeds and three head initializations per backbone. With a common evaluation protocol, mean success is 70.4% on Cube, 48.7% on Push-T, 100.0% on FourRoom, and 71.1% on Visual AntMaze. The method improves over the corresponding HWM search baseline on three environments and has the same mean on Push-T. Dedicated measurements on an NVIDIA L40S give 1.28-4.39x end-to-end speedups for batched evaluation. Ablations identify state-adaptive conditioning as a consistent contributor, while predictor-mediated subgoals and unrestricted conditions have environment-dependent benefits.