Graph World Models: Concepts, Taxonomy, and Future Directions
For AI researchers working on world models, this survey provides the first systematic definition and taxonomy of graph-based world models, organizing a fragmented field.
This paper formalizes graph world models (GWMs) as a unified paradigm to address limitations of classical world models, proposing a taxonomy based on relational inductive biases (spatial, physical, logical) and reviewing representative models. It identifies open challenges such as dynamic graph adaptation and the need for dedicated benchmarks.
As one of the mainstream models of artificial intelligence, world models allow agents to learn the representation of the environment for efficient prediction and planning. However, classical world models based on flat tensors face several key problems, including noise sensitivity, error accumulation and weak reasoning. To address these limitations, many recent studies use graph structure to decompose the environment into entity nodes and interactive edges, and model virtual environments in a structured space. This paper systematically formalizes and unifies these emerging graph-based works under the concept of graph world models (GWMs). To the best of our knowledge, GWMs have not yet been explicitly defined and surveyed as a unified research paradigm. Furthermore, we propose a taxonomy based on relational inductive biases (RIB), categorizing GWMs by the specific structural priors they inject: (1) spatial RIB for topological abstraction; (2) physical RIB for dynamic simulation; and (3) logical RIB for causal and semantic reasoning. For each model category, we outline the key design principles, summarize representative models, and conduct comparative analyses. We further discuss open challenges and future directions, including dynamic graph adaptation, probabilistic relational dynamics, multi-granularity inductive biases, and the need for dedicated benchmarks and evaluation metrics for GWMs.