Few-Shot Residual Adaptation of Pretrained Latent World Models

Pretrained latent world models can support visual planning and control, but their predictions may fail when physical dynamics change at deployment. We study whether such models can adapt from only a few interactions without modifying their pretrained weights or identifying the changed physical parameters. We introduce a few-shot residual adaptation approach that learns self-supervised corrections from latent prediction errors. The corrections are applied both inside the latent predictor and directly to its predicted latent state, while the pretrained world model remains frozen. We evaluate the approach in simulation and on a real robot under center-of-mass and friction shifts. These changes reduce the success of the frozen model to near zero. Using three interaction episodes for adaptation, our dual-site approach recovers 90\% success under the center-of-mass shift and 100\% under the modified friction on the real robot. Ablations show that correcting both locations outperforms single-site adaptation. Our diagnostics further suggest that much of the learned correction reduces a general prediction mismatch, while successful control also depends on shift-specific information captured during adaptation.