[codex] Add July 5 world model curation updates

[iChubai]

Summary

• Refresh the README recency marker to July 5, 2026.
• Continue the cumulative world-model curation PR with the July 5 increment.
• Add Valdi (arXiv 2607.00917) to the MBRL table as a value-diffusion latent world model with MPC and official code.
• Preserve the prior curated July batch already in this PR across driving, robotics/manipulation, navigation, WAM/VLA, video simulators, JEPA, planning, surveys, and benchmarks.

Curation Notes

Included entries have a direct world-model mechanism such as action-conditioned prediction, latent/3D state rollout, closed-loop simulation, planning/evaluation through imagined futures, or benchmark/survey coverage for those systems.

This run checked late-June and early-July arXiv results plus the requested external lists: knightnemo/Awesome-World-Models, LMD0311/Awesome-World-Model, leofan90/Awesome-World-Models, Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels, gracezhao1997/Awesome-Video-World-Models-with-AR-Diffusion, and ziqihuangg/Awesome-From-Video-Generation-to-World-Model.

Filtered out adjacent or lower-signal candidates that were mostly generic video generation, retail/deployment tooling, broad theory without a clear actionable world-model contribution, or duplicates already represented in the README.

Checks

• node scripts/check-arxiv-duplicates.mjs README.md (554 unique IDs, 36 allowed duplicates)
• git diff --check

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR advances the curated “Awesome World Models” README to a July 2, 2026 curation pass, adding new late-June/early-July world-model-related papers/benchmarks and updating the repo’s “last updated” metadata accordingly.

Changes:

• Updated the “Last Updated” badge and the stated arXiv verification date to July 2, 2026.
• Added multiple new high-signal entries across robotics manipulation, navigation, WAM/VLA, physics simulation, occupancy/BEV, memory, closed-loop evaluation, multi-agent traffic simulation, surveys, and benchmarks.
• Removed/repositioned a few entries to resolve duplicates while keeping the most complete primary-source entry per arXiv ID.

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