ACWM-RM: A Reference-Free Reward Model from Complementary Mismatch Preferences

Reinforcement learning has gained attention for improving action-conditioned world models (ACWMs), as it enables reward-driven optimization of visual quality (VQ) and action-following fidelity (AF) beyond flow-matching optimization. Realizing this potential requires reward signals that reliably rank videos by both VQ and AF. However, existing rewards capture only one dimension: metric-based rewards assess VQ but require ground-truth videos and do not directly assess AF, while inverse dynamics model (IDM) rewards assess AF without references but do not guarantee VQ. Moreover, IDMs, typically trained on real videos, may provide unreliable rewards for generated videos containing visual artifacts and physical inconsistencies. In this work, we introduce the Action and Video Mismatch Benchmark (AVM-Eval), comprising 67.2k pairs that evaluate how reliably IDMs assess AF on real and generated videos. We then propose ACWM-RM, a reward model that jointly assesses VQ and AF without ground-truth videos during reward computation. To train it, we first construct the Action and Video Mismatch Preference Dataset (AVM-Pref) with 506.3k pairs providing complementary supervision: action-mismatch pairs supervise AF, while video-mismatch pairs supervise VQ and expose the model to generated videos. We then pretrain an action-conditioned predictor on real videos to learn forward dynamics before jointly training it with a patch-weighted score head on AVM-Pref to transfer these dynamics to AF assessment on generated videos. Evaluation on AVM-Eval reveals the limited reliability of IDMs on generated videos, while downstream RL experiments show that ACWM-RM outperforms reward baselines in both criteria.