How Much Planning Is Enough? Reducing Search and Computation in World-Model Planning

Visual world models enable goal-directed control through decision-time action search, but their deployment efficiency is often limited by conservatively large planning budgets. We show that competitive task performance can be achieved without agreement with the Full-budget action, that sufficient budgets vary across model–task pairs, and that iterative planners repeatedly encode solve-invariant context. To address these inefficiencies, we propose SufficientPlan, a simple deployment framework that requires no modification to pretrained world models or planner updates. Its Paired Sequential Budget Certification (PSBC) component uses paired closed-loop evidence to search for and certify a reduced model–task-specific budget within a predefined Full-performance tolerance. Its StaticContext Reuse (SCR) component caches observation and goal representations across search iterations while preserving candidate-dependent planning and selected actions. Experiments across multiple world-model backbones and visualcontrol tasks show that SufficientPlan substantially reduces search budgets and planning latency while maintaining competitive control performance.