Do Robots Need World Models? — CoRL 2026 Workshop

This half-day workshop debates when explicit predictive models improve robot learning and when end-to-end policies or hybrid systems are preferable. Six debate motions examine generalization, counterfactual reasoning, data efficiency, evaluation, deployment costs and the limits of current benchmarks. Invited talks, contributed spotlights and posters connect theory to empirical comparisons, including negative results. Confirmed speakers include Chelsea Finn, Yunzhu Li, Georgia Chalvatzaki and Vincent Sitzmann. Paper submissions closed on 12 October; camera-ready papers are due on 6 November and optional revisions on 9 December, all at 23:59 Pacific time.