How do we make robot policies robust to rare but high-impact failures? Video #World# #Models# (WMs) are rapidly becoming a powerful tool for robotics, enabling policy evaluation and improvement by "imagining" future outcomes. But there's a catch: these imagined futures are typically nominal samples, making it easy to overlook the rare yet safety-critical events that matter most. In our new paper, StressDream: Steering Video World Models for Robust Policy Evaluation and Improvement, we explore a simple but powerful idea: 💡 Instead of passively sampling futures, actively steer world model imaginations toward high-impact yet still plausible scenarios. StressDream optimizes the initial diffusion noise at inference time, allowing us to generate targeted stress-test scenarios without retraining the world model. This enables: - More robust policy evaluation by exposing failure modes that random sampling often misses. - Improved policy optimization by training against challenging but realistic imagined futures. As generative world models become a foundation for #Physical# #AI#, the ability to systematically probe their "long tail" of plausible futures will be increasingly important for building reliable and trustworthy autonomous systems. 📌 𝖯𝗋𝗈𝗃𝖾𝖼𝗍 𝖯𝖺𝗀𝖾: 📄 𝖯𝖺𝗉𝖾𝗋: Work led by Junwon Seo, with a great set of collaborators: Sushant Veer, Thomas Ran Tian, Wenhao Ding, Apoorva Sharma, Karen Leung, Edward Schmerling, Andrea Bajcsy. @NVIDIADRIVE @NVIDIAAI #Robotics# #WorldModels# #PhysicalAISafety# #AISafety# #AutonomousSystems# #RobotLearnin#