Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for using an environment model to simulate state transitions of an environment being interacted with by an agent that is controlled using a policy neural network. One of the methods includes initializing an internal representation of a state of the environment at a current time point; repeatedly performing the following operations: receiving an action to be performed by the agent; generating, based on the internal representation, a predicted latent representation that is a prediction of a latent representation that would have been generated by the policy neural network by processing an observation characterizing the state of the environment corresponding to the internal representation; and updating the internal representation to simulate a state transition caused by the agent performing the received action by processing the predicted latent representation and the received action using the environment model.