Zero-shot World Models Are Developmentally Efficient Learners

arXiv:2604.10333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Young children demonstrate early abilities to understand their physical world, estimating depth, motion, object coherence, interactions, and many other aspects of physical scene understanding. Children are both data-efficient and flexible cognitive systems, creating competence despite extremely limited training data, while generalizing to myriad untrained tasks -- a major challenge even for today's best AI systems. Here we introduce a novel computa