When Does Dynamics Randomization Test Context Inference?

Overview & Synopsis

Environments with randomized dynamics are widely used to ask whether world models need explicit context inference. However, randomization can leave little predictive information for a context encoder to add, because distinct latent parameters may produce similar transitions at visited states, or those states may already reveal the active context. We formalize the remaining one-step information as predictive headroom and compare kernels under fixed and visited state--action distributions to distinguish changes in query coverage from changes in context weights. We analyze discrete and continuous environments and find low headroom both when kernels differ little and when visitation reduces an otherwise large discrepancy. At the same time, resetting state components increases headroom, showing that context evidence accumulates in state. We propose reporting this headroom alongside the randomized parameters, so that gains from explicit context inference can be interpreted relative to the information missing from the current state and action.