Vision-Language Agents Can Learn in Their Own Latent Worlds

Learning from experience is essential for building the next generation of agents that continually expand their capabilities. Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) already internalize rich world knowledge, yet this knowledge is rarely leveraged to drive policy improvement through online interaction. Realizing this potential efficiently remains challenging, as policy updates shift the agent’s interaction distribution, requiring the world model to adapt accordingly, while continually updating large pretrained models is computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we introduce **Dwell**, a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework that reframes a VLM as a recurrent latent transition operator, endowing it with the ability to predict, adjust, and act in latent space. Leveraging the VLM’s own representations and its dual role as both world model and policy, the agent continually learns from real interactions to anticipate and evaluate action outcomes, and from latent imagination to improve its behavior. Across five interactive visual environments, our method achieves the strongest overall performance among trainable methods while substantially reducing the compute required for imagination, showing that effective world models for VLM agents need not reconstruct the future—they need to predict futures that are useful for action.