WM4ISAC: World Model for Proactive ISAC Under Dynamic Blockage

Abstract: Dynamic blockage severely degrades vehicular integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), since narrow millimeter-wave beams must be adjusted before the line-of-sight (LoS) link is blocked or misaligned. This paper proposes WM4ISAC, a proactive ISAC framework built on a world model that learns a reusable latent dynamics model of the traffic environment from downlink radar heatmaps, rather than directly mapping observations to beam indices. The proposed framework uses a vision (V) module to compress sensing observations, an action-conditioned memory (M) module to predict latent environment evolution, and lightweight event heads to evaluate LoS alignment, blockage, and scatter-assisted non-line-of-sight (NLoS) alignment for candidate beams. A codebook-level controller then uses these event predictions to proactively switch between LoS and NLoS beams without knowing the future user or blocker states. Simulations under dynamic blockage show that WM4ISAC improves the mean rate by $28.9\%$ over current LoS tracking, raises the 5\%-tile rate from $0.9$ Mbps to $30.5$ Mbps, and reaches $88.7\%$ of the perfect-information upper bound.