Mechanism by which the auxiliary loss improves planning success

Identify the route by which the success-criterion auxiliary loss raises the success rate, including how improvements in candidate-action ranking translate into successful goal-reaching trials.

Background

The experiments show that supervising success-criterion quantities can improve success rates, but the improvement cannot be explained solely by readout accuracy. The auxiliary loss improves the ranking of candidate action sequences, yet the magnitude of ranking improvement does not track the magnitude of the success-rate gain. Consequently, the causal pathway from the auxiliary loss to successful planning remains unresolved.

References

Third, the route by which the auxiliary loss raises the success rate is not identified; the loss improves the ranking of candidate action sequences, but the size of that improvement does not track the size of the success-rate gain (Appendix~\ref{app:extra}).

— Supervise What Decides Success: Criterion-Aligned Auxiliary Losses for Latent World-Model Planning  (2610.01224 - Hara et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Section 5, paragraph “Future work” (Conclusion and limitations)

Fourth, the degradation caused by supervising only some of the quantities is not explained by a worse readout of the unsupervised quantities (Section~\ref{sec:dissociation}), and its mechanism is unresolved.

— Supervise What Decides Success: Criterion-Aligned Auxiliary Losses for Latent World-Model Planning  (2610.01224 - Hara et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Section 5, paragraph “Future work” (Conclusion and limitations)