Understanding Rollout Error in Graph World Models

Abstract

World models are increasingly used for planning by predicting future states under candidate actions. Many planning environments, however, are naturally graph-structured, with agents, tools, skills, routes, and dependencies connected through fixed or evolving relations. Understanding how prediction errors accumulate in such graph-structured rollouts is therefore critical for reliable long-horizon planning.In this work, we systematically study how rollout errors propagate in Graph World Models (GWMs). We analyze both fixed- and dynamic-edge regimes and derive topology-aware error bounds that characterize the roles of graph structure, learned dynamics, and evolving edges. We then validate these theoretical findings across synthetic graph topologies and heterogeneous agent-graph testbeds, showing that rollout error and planning regret increase with horizon and that dynamic-edge training is important when graph structure evolves. Together, these results characterize when GWMs remain reliable under long-horizon planning and when graph structure amplifies rollout errors. Motivated by these findings, we propose Error-Aware GWM, which combines spectral regularization, rollout consistency, and critical-node weighting, and improves long-horizon stability without sacrificing one-step accuracy. Experiments show that Error-Aware GWM consistently improves long-horizon rollout stability without sacrificing prediction accuracy.