https://embodied-ai-radar.com/topics/world-models.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12870 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

World action models jointly predict video and actions conditioned on language. Existing studies focus primarily on architectures and training mechanisms, typically treating language-video alignment acquired through video pretraining as an established foundation. However, introducing action learning may impair this alignment. Principled guidance on data and supervision design for maintaining language-video alignment during action learning remains limited. To investigate this, we curate a pool of approximately 47,000 hours of general videos, egocentric videos, UMI demonstrations, and robot …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12824 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Soft powered descent landings are becoming evermore important in the field of space exploration and scientific advancement, because of their ability to deliver mission critical payloads, both highly accurately and safely. The high efficiency restriction on planetary landings due to the severely limited fuel supply results in the need for optimal guidance trajectories and control. Model based reinforcement learning is proving to be an important tool in simplifying the highly complex process of generating optimal guidance trajectories and control. In this work, we present DreamLander, a state …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12732 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

World models have increasingly been applied as a model-based control method for robotics tasks such as manipulation and locomotion. While early world model architectures relied on decoders to prevent mode collapse and learn a predictable latent space, recent works on world models, such as Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture or LeWorldModel, increasingly aim to learn embeddings without a grounding decoder, utilising only a latent forward dynamics predictor and a stabilising entropy term. In this paper, we set out to demonstrate that the further introduction of two additional latent losses …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12678 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

A world model predicts how a scene changes after an action, and a planner uses it to search for actions that reach a goal. If the camera moves or the controller changes, the same command moves the robot differently: when its commands are turned by 90 degrees, a frozen planner with the LeWM world model that succeeds in 77.5% of episodes succeeds in only 7.8%. Current fixes retrain the model, need training data, or forget a set-up when it returns. We propose Library of Hands (LoH), a training-free method that keeps the world model frozen and corrects only the map from commands to applied …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11887 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

One-step stochastic world models avoid the mode averaging of deterministic feature predictors without the tens of network evaluations per step that diffusion and flow matching require. The simplest such objective is nearest-of-m matching (conditional implicit maximum likelihood estimation, IMLE): draw m candidate futures and pull only the one closest to the observed outcome. Recent work conjectures that a small m suffices for feature-space world models and that a strictly proper energy score should replace the hard minimum. We test both claims with one-step world models on frozen DINOv2/v3 …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11869 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Spatial generalization in robot world models depends on whether action representations capture the physical relationships that remain valid across changing spatial configurations. Yet different coordinates can describe the same interaction, whereas similar motions can produce different outcomes when local physical conditions change. How these distinctions affect learned prediction remains insufficiently understood. This study evaluates matched action representations defined in world, object, and surface coordinate frames using a controlled robotic peeling benchmark. Global pose and contact …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11780 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Sampling-based planners such as MPPI and CEM query a learned world model thousands of times per control step, so low-bit world models are an obvious way to make model-based control cheaper on a robot. With round-to-nearest activation quantization and no calibration, we find that planning can collapse, by up to 100 points of success, while the world model's latent one-step prediction error stays no larger than that of a stochastic rounding scheme that plans well. At the same bit width, what decides the outcome is not the size of the rounding error but whether it persists across planner …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11605 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Quadrotors inspecting buildings and tunnels must navigate unknown clutter with a forward-facing depth camera whose limited field of view constrains scene understanding and collision-avoiding navigation. Recent world-model agents learn navigation through imagined experience (e.g., AirDreamer), but remain data-intensive and often lack explicit geometric memory and awareness of what the camera can observe. We propose ScanDreamer, a map-grounded world model that constructs an online 2D scan-memory map from depth images and vehicle pose. Our world model, actor, and critic are conditioned on this …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11521 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

World models learn internal simulators of environment dynamics for prediction, planning, and control, yet learning them from limited, noisy, and partial observations remains challenging. While much progress has focused on pixel-based observations, many physical systems instead provide vector-valued measurements that reveal only part of the underlying state. We introduce K-PWM, a probabilistic world model for prediction and control under partial observation. K-PWM couples Koopman-bilinear latent dynamics with a nonlinear observation decoder and performs probabilistic latent-state inference …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11516 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

World models allow autonomous vehicles to imagine the consequences of candidate actions before execution, but their reliability depends on the futures represented in their training data. We identify a survivorship bias in driving world models: because the futures recorded in prevailing driving datasets almost always end safely, existing models often imagine benign outcomes even when a collision is imminent. We introduce a neutral world model (NWM) that learns both routine and safety-critical futures from a mixture of routine driving and real accident videos with a bounding-box-guided …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11166 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation requires rich spatial foresight over both the surrounding scene and the robot hand. Existing world-action models often acquire such predictive knowledge through explicit future prediction. We introduce DexForesight, a framework that learns spatial foresight implicitly by injecting dynamics-aware world representations into the latent space of a dexterous policy. During training, DexForesight learns an action-conditioned spatial world model from offline scene depth, kinematic hand geometry, and demonstration trajectories. The world model predicts 3D hand-point motion and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11085 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Generative world modeling from large-scale visual data offers a promising path toward scalable robot manipulation. This calls for an intermediate representation that can be supervised at scale and remains actionable for downstream control. We propose 3D full-object flow, an object-centric motion representation that assigns dense 3D trajectories to points across the complete surface of a target object, including its occluded regions. By extending visible-surface object flow to the full object geometry, this representation makes complete object motion explicit and applies uniformly to both …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10967 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation with world action models (WAMs) relies on hand configuration and contact information, yet joint-state and whole-hand tactile observations may be partially or entirely missing. RGB images provide scene context and hand-object geometry but are insufficient to reliably recover these missing modalities. We further observe a correlation between hand state and tactile information. Motivated by this observation, we introduce BAT-WAM, a framework that bridges visual, joint-state, and tactile representations for WAMs. BAT-WAM learns separate codebooks and decoders for the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10660 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Latent world models enable visual control by planning action sequences in compact representation spaces, but a gap remains between how latent dynamics are learned and how they are used for planning. First, teacher-forced training does not expose the dynamics model to the recursively predicted latent states encountered during planning. Second, sampling-based planners typically initialize action search from goal-agnostic proposals, without exploiting the action-conditioned dynamics learned by the world model. We introduce Dynamics-Informed Action Learning (DIAL) to bridge these two gaps. During …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10435 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Autonomous robot teams deployed in remote, unstructured environments may face changes in the environment, hardware, and team composition that degrade previously effective policies. Shifting mission objectives can be handled by selecting a different solution from an existing Pareto set, but shifting deployment conditions can reorder the set itself, making previously dominated policies competitive or new policies necessary. However, evaluating these policies in new contexts while minimizing risk to the hardware remains an open problem. We argue that, although largely untested in this domain, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10316 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Embedded AI is moving from perception to prediction. Robots now use world models$\unicode{x2014}$learned simulators that predict the outcome of candidate actions in a compressed latent space before any is executed. Every predicted step must be computed on board within a tight power and thermal budget, yet the energy these steps fundamentally require, and how far real hardware sits from it, have not been characterized. We derive lower bounds on the arithmetic operations and the CMOS dynamic energy of a latent state transition from information theory and Boolean circuit complexity. Profiling a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09892 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09293 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Recently, world-action models (WAMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for robot manipulation. By jointly modeling action generation and future observation prediction, WAMs can act and anticipate the outcomes of the actions. However, existing WAMs typically rely on frozen pretrained encoders trained with reconstruction, which may not produce representations well suited for robot control. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning physicallygrounded, control-relevant representations for WAMs. We propose MDF++, a visuo-tactile world-action model that learns latent representations of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08338 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

We introduce GPWM, a Generative Particle World Model that predicts how 3D scenes evolve by generating the motion of particles and rigid bodies over time. Unlike video world models that generate scene appearance, GPWM operates directly in 3D physical space. A single representation and architecture cover rigid, deformable, cloth, and granular materials, in both passive physics and robotic interaction. GPWM is an object-aware multi-resolution transformer that combines flow matching with diffusion forcing to generate coherent physical trajectories far beyond its training horizon. We train and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08156 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World-action models adapt pretrained video generators, and vision-language-action models build on pretrained vision-language backbones; both tie policy architecture and inference cost to large transformers designed for generation rather than control. It remains unclear how much these generation-oriented choices affect control. In this work, we introduce Latent Action JEPA (La-JEPA), a compact world-action model whose policy transformer is trained from scratch in the feature space of a pretrained V-JEPA 2.1 encoder. Following Fast-WAM, La-JEPA learns to predict future features jointly with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08111 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World-action models (WAMs) jointly model future traffic states and driving actions for end-to-end autonomous driving in intelligent transportation systems. However, their action learning remains dominated by expert-trajectory imitation, leaving unsafe alternatives close to expert trajectories insufficiently constrained. To improve WAM robustness in safety-critical scenarios, we propose NegWAM, a safety post-training framework for unified WAMs that learns explicit safety boundaries from near-expert failure trajectories. NegWAM constructs negative trajectories that are geometrically close to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07912 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) for autonomous driving couple the driving policy and the visual world model in a single generative network whose objectives are fixed post-training. Conditioning on a new driving objective requires retraining. We study energy guidance as a general mechanism and present GuidedWAM, a model-agnostic framework for injecting driving objectives into frozen WAMs at sampling time. Our framework constructs each objective as differentiable energies on the sampler's intermediate clean-action estimate, which needs only forward access to the frozen model, and is stabilized by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07850 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Robot world models predict action-conditioned future visual states to support robotic planning and decision making. However, visual reconstruction does not fully capture task progress, semantic evaluation alone provides limited constraints on fine-grained visual errors, and homogeneous predictions limit comparative feedback. We present RoboImagine, a framework for post-training autoregressive robotic world models through candidate-future comparisons with semantic and visual feedback. Diverse search promotes diversity among candidate trajectories under shared visual observations, action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07229 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable demonstration collection independently of a specific robot. However, its moving, close-range gripper cameras entangle camera and object motion without a stable external view, leaving the metric geometry needed for precise manipulation implicit in RGB. We introduce Spatial-UMI-Dream, a 5B spatial World Action Model (WAM) pretrained on 605 hours of RGB-D UMI data through two-stage training -- world-only adaptation followed by joint world-action learning -- to jointly predict future RGB, fisheye-aligned metric depth, and actions. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41970 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

World-action models increasingly apply test-time scaling, spending extra inference computation on candidate selection and adaptive allocation to improve control. Such gains are credible only when candidates carry exploitable signal, nominal compute savings become real speedup, and evaluation stays reliable. We audit all three on Cosmos Policy and RoboCasa with a premise-first, pre-registered methodology. On clean data, a learned value selector is 1.66 pp worse than random; a hindsight oracle gains only 1.40 pp, with an episode-level interval spanning zero; and 82% of states show identical …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06653 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

A robot action can satisfy shape and range constraints yet carry the wrong semantics: axes may be permuted, signs inverted, rotations rescaled, or gripper polarity reversed. We study learned state-action-effect relations as offline contracts for detecting these mismatches and ranking their likely fields. Clean held-out transitions calibrate alarms; a fixed inverse vocabulary supports closed-set localization. On ten LIBERO Spatial tasks comprising 432 source episodes, a capacity-controlled comparison at 2.5% empirical clean false-positive rate gives 46.1% recall for a ridge forward residual, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05847 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) support planning by comparing predicted latent states with an encoded goal. For this comparison to guide temporal progress, states closer in time to the goal should receive lower costs. However, training representations for prediction and distribution regularization does not directly enforce this ordering. We examine this mismatch in flat LeWorldModel (LeWM) by analyzing how its Euclidean goal cost changes with temporal separation. Our analysis identifies conditions under which states at different long offsets receive similar average costs, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05448 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Large language models understand passengers' driving commands, but as driving agents they reason in generated text for seconds and must infer each action's consequences implicitly from the scene. We present Jev-AD, which pairs Jev, a typed decision model that answers predefined questions with probabilities, not generated text, with a language world model that predicts for every candidate action how nearby vehicles move over the next two seconds. Code turns these predictions into foreseen consequences, which Jev compares instead of inferring them from coordinates. In simulated highway merging …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05072 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Although existing candidate trajectory evaluators have substantially improved end-to-end planning accuracy, their underlying mechanism remains suboptimal. Model-based evaluators typically make scoring future-aware by explicitly predicting candidate-conditioned future states over the planning horizon, which we term rollout. However, rollout incurs high inference cost and accumulates prediction errors. We argue that planning does not require reconstructing a full future scene for each candidate, but only future-relevant information for reliable comparison. We therefore propose RFWorld, a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05023 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual dynamics and robot actions. However, most existing WAMs model dense short-horizon visual dynamics, capturing local interactions but providing limited long-range task context. Extending prediction horizons increases uncertainty and computation while entangling task-level evolution with fine-grained local dynamics, obscuring their dependencies and distinct roles in action generation. We propose HiLo-WAM, which decouples long-horizon task evolution from local visual dynamics while jointly modeling their …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04870 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

A robot world model that serves as a simulator must do more than generate plausible videos: it must faithfully follow commanded actions, maintain consistency across camera views, and sustain coherent long-horizon rollouts. We present PrimeSim, an action-conditioned, multiview world model simulator that addresses these challenges through progressive midtraining and posttraining. Starting from a pretrained video generator, we midtrain on 30,110 hours of robot demonstrations spanning 22 platforms. To improve action following, we introduce a unified cross-embodiment action representation and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04839 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated body motion and hand interaction over time, and a plausible-looking command sequence can still drop a held object or leave an interaction incomplete. We present action-conditioned latent foresight, a latent world-action model (WAM) that evaluates proposed command sequences before execution. An action generator proposes joint motion-hand command sequences from vision, language, and the robot state. An action-conditioned endpoint predictor estimates the visual features each sequence prefix reaches and measures progress toward a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04711 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in video modeling have driven substantial progress in world action models (WAMs). Existing approaches exploit pretrained video priors by decoding actions from latent representations or inferring them from generated videos. The underlying link is causal: robot actions produce changes in the scene, and video observations of these changes provide evidence for inferring the actions that produced them. However, existing training formulations do not by themselves ensure that actions and their predicted visual consequences are consistent, potentially limiting the use of pretrained …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04527 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) use the predictive knowledge of pretrained video diffusion models for robot control through future video prediction. However, iterative video denoising is costly, and inaccurate visual predictions can compromise action prediction. Our key idea is to make this predictive knowledge available through visual representations computed from the current observation, enabling action prediction without generating future videos. We introduce DreamFree, a WAM that repurposes a pretrained video diffusion model as a predictive visual encoder through representation distillation. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04492 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Predicting how the world evolves in response to robot actions is central to policy learning, evaluation, and planning. However, many action-conditioned world models predict future observations in 2D image or video space without explicitly modeling the underlying 3D scene, making spatial consistency across viewpoints and over long-horizon interactions challenging. We introduce 3D World Simulator, an action-conditioned multimodal world modeling framework that jointly predicts appearance, geometry, and tactile observations from a unified 3D representation. Our approach combines a hybrid …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04016 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

World models are increasingly used to support prediction and planning in embodied agents, but the knowledge is usually established before deployment and then carried into later encounters. Continual operation faces a different problem. A familiar environment may change, and the agent must use previous experience without allowing old expectations to override current physical evidence. This study asks what repeated physical experience must contribute for a spatial world model to become progressively more useful rather than simply more persistent. A physics-grounded dynamic maze separates …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03585 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) jointly generate actions and imagined futures, but a plausible prediction need not be realized by its co-generated action. We introduce WISE (\emph{World Action Inference Scaling through Evaluation}), a pre-execution selector that scores each sampled rollout on action validity and temporal regularity, inverse-dynamics consistency between the proposed action and the imagined motion, and instruction-conditioned task progress, and executes the highest-scoring candidate while keeping the WAM frozen. With four candidates per decision, WISE raises closed-loop success from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03428 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

A robot that acts around people needs a world model of the human: a belief over the person's body state and a dynamics model that predicts where that state goes next. This abstract argues that two published components form exactly these two halves, and specifies how to couple them. KNOWN [1] reconstructs the 3D human body while estimating both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in real time (11.6 ms per frame); its aleatoric term identifies unreliable observations, its epistemic term identifies inputs from low-density regions of the training data, and refinement driven by the epistemic term …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03294 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation requires fine-grained control and complex physical interactions with the environment, posing significant challenges for robot policy learning. Vision-only policies struggle with such tasks, as contact states and interaction forces are difficult to infer from visual observations alone. Existing methods mitigate this issue by incorporating force or tactile sensing. However, they often treat these signals as auxiliary observations without fully exploiting their role in modeling future interaction dynamics. To address this, we propose ForceLDM, a force-aware latent …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02699 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

We reimplement the dynamics model of the Robotic World Model (RWM) and test the uncertainty estimate that its follow-up, RWM-U, uses to penalize reward in offline policy optimization. Our implementation matches the released model's gradients. On held-out data, training on the model's own rollouts beats one-step training at the preregistered long horizon for all ten episodes, but loses on short one-step windows. RWM-U's ensemble disagreement ranks rollout errors better than forecast step (Spearman rho = 0.90 at 100 steps), yet its spread substantially understates error: one-sigma coverage on …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02600 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) have recently shown great promise in robotic control, benefiting from the future imagination capability of large-scale pretrained video models. However, most existing WAMs require explicitly imagining future states at test time, incurring substantial computational overhead and latency that make them unsuitable for real-time robotic control. In this paper, we propose W2A, a two-stage distillation framework for real-time robotic manipulation that distills intermediate denoising representations from a video diffusion model into an action model during training, while …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01844 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Navigation world models predict future observations conditioned on navigation actions to support planning, but their generalization across real-world environments remains constrained by the limited coverage of action-labeled data. Action-free navigation videos provide diverse visual experience, yet lack the recorded actions required for action-conditioned training. We introduce OpenNWM, a generalist navigation world model with latent action pretraining. It learns universal latent actions from large-scale action-free videos through visual prediction pretraining, and further aligns them with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01677 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

We present Xiaomi Auto World Model 2.0, a unified streaming causal world model for Physical AI. It models and generates causal physical evolution in the real world, and unifies heterogeneous conditioning inputs for view-consistent generation. The architecture integrates View-Temporal Attention (VTA) to capture cross-view spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics, together with Multi-view Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) to encode positional relationships across views and time. WorldRec 2.0 reconstructs static and dynamic 3D Gaussians from multi-view, multi-temporal observations in a single …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01600 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Robots manipulating in cluttered spaces must often plan from partial views where foreground objects occlude the target, surrounding geometry, and usable free space. Reactive policies often miss these hidden constraints, while exhaustive search becomes computationally prohibitive in dense clutter. We present SCOUT, an occlusion-aware planning framework that bridges high-level deliberation with grounded physical rollouts. SCOUT leverages an object-centric scene representation to reconstruct hidden geometry and derive a relational planning state capturing blocker hierarchies and accessibility …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01039 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

When a World Action Model fails at control, is the bottleneck proposal generation or trajectory scoring? We introduce pico-WAM, a compact model with supplied physical state for tracing policy-dynamics interactions. Using 206 Push-T demonstrations and 15 training seeds, we compare data regimes and search configurations. Counterfactual branch training improves short-horizon cost ranking and enlarges the coverage advantage of policy-restarted over warm-started search by 4.8 percentage points; restart wins under both data regimes. Replacing learned trajectory scores with simulator costs improves …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00951 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

We test whether Koopman structure, linear dynamics in a lifted state space, helps when a humanoid whole-body tracking policy is trained by backpropagating through a differentiable world model, replacing the MLP world model of an otherwise unchanged pipeline for simulated Unitree G1 tracking. It does not: return is at best equal (0.823 versus 0.830), one-step error on identical data is 1.3 to 1.6 times the MLP's, and training is about 15% slower. Lifted rollouts diverge or fail to train a policy; of the schemes tested, re-lifting at every imagined step trains best. Re-lifting never uses the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00612 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

State of the art latent dynamics world models achieve impressive performance for robot planning. But do they actually encode the physics of the world? In this paper, we show that popular world models today achieve strong results on tasks that reduce to image similarity but forget key details about objects in the scene like mass, deformation, friction, and bounciness. We achieve this by defining precisely what ought to be encoded in such a world model and introducing two new evaluation methods that can directly tease physical properties and easily scale to new ones. Our evaluation, which we …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00513 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Most agentic robotic systems use vision-language models (VLMs) either to orchestrate predefined skills or to directly generate actions, constraints, and control programs. The former is limited by the available skill library, while the latter requires VLMs to reason about precise geometry and contact. In this paper, we propose WorldSketch, a new paradigm for agentic robotics in which a VLM constructs a world model rather than generating robot actions. The VLM acts as an agent that actively queries perception tools to build and visually validate a minimal kinematic world model, capturing only …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00177 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Egocentric observations provide a robot-centric view of manipulation processes, capturing contact interactions and object-state changes that are important for visuomotor policy learning but difficult to observe from external cameras. However, collecting such data at scale remains expensive due to additional hardware requirements and platform-specific deployment costs. Synthesizing egocentric observations from large-scale exocentric manipulation videos provides a scalable alternative. However, existing methods struggle to synthesize physically consistent and policy-relevant egocentric videos …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.42146 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Planning with world models enables test-time adaptation for embodied agents, offering superior generalization over direct policy learning. However, long-horizon tasks remain hindered by cumulative errors and search complexity. Existing hierarchical methods often use rigid macro-actions or latent skills, leading to brittle representations and limited fine-grained control. We introduce ID-WM (Implicit Dynamics World Models), a hierarchical world model that decouples state-space reachability from local control. Our framework utilizes a high-level model to sample feasible transitions across the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.42096 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) learn latent variables from observations and use these to both predict the evolution of the scene and to generate actions. The prediction has to be of the whole scene, whereas only a portion of the scene causes actions. WAMs fitted to demonstrations do not, in general, guarantee that they will generate actions solely from the latent causes of the demonstrated actions (the action-relevant latent variables), as the model could just as well learn to imitate in this way whilst entangling the action-relevant latent variables with the nuisance variables. We therefore …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41330 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Motion planning in clutter is embodiment-specific: the feasible free space and reachable commands depend on each robot's geometry and dynamics. Existing cross-embodiment policies output normalized commands that disregard these differences, or compensate through per-robot training and distillation. World models can in principle pool cross-embodiment data, yet command-conditioned models bind their latent dynamics to a single action space, while pose-conditioned models omit the mapping from commands to body-specific motion. On flat ground, however, embodiment affects the planner's observations …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40748 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Achieving the broad task generalization of embodied models in physical environments remains a central challenge in robot learning. We study this challenge in World Action Models (WAMs) through two complementary capabilities: video generalization, which predicts the visual evolution of new tasks, and action generalization, which translates these predictions into executable behavior through a video-to-action bridge. By varying video and action supervision for tasks outside an initial training set, we examine their respective contributions to task transfer. On RoboTwin 2.0, using only …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40401 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

We introduce Continuous-Action World Models (CoAWM), a framework for learning cross-embodiment spatiotemporal dynamics priors that support robot action generation across embodiments and execution frequencies. At its core is a shared latent function space that captures the spatial and temporal structure of robot actions. We learn this space through two stages. First, function pretraining brings trajectories from different embodiments and sampling frequencies into a common representation, learning shared dynamics priors through action reconstruction and consistency across temporal sampling …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40026 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Choosing a robot action model requires evidence about task capability, adaptation cost, deployment requirements, and the reliability of reported conclusions. Success rates alone offer limited guidance to researchers with different computing budgets and goals. We propose RoboSeed, a multidimensional evaluation framework for vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAM), within a continuing program to train, evaluate, and openly release robot models with verifiable evidence for model selection. The framework defines five dimensions: capability, downstream training affordability, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39816 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) increasingly couple internal visual or world representations with action generation, making their world-to-action pathways a critical yet poorly understood source of robustness. We investigate when perturbations to these internal representations actually become behaviorally consequential, and uncover a pronounced mismatch between representation perturbability and closed-loop vulnerability: attack effectiveness varies sharply across visual K/V routes, while larger representation displacement does not reliably imply stronger control failure. Our analysis attributes …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39528 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at instruction following, yet most remain feed-forward: they condition actions only on the current observation and discard both long-horizon temporal context and the hierarchical structure of VLM representations. We present PRIME W0, a hierarchical conditional flow-matching framework that closes this gap through three synergistic designs: (1)per-layer KV injection from a pretrained VLM into an Adaptive MoE action expert; (2)dynamics-aware conditioning via asynchronous world-model subgoal-image prediction and a DINOv2 historical-frame semantic bridge; …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39367 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) can condition robot actions on generated visual futures, but this additional context is neither cost-free nor uniformly beneficial. We examine what a predicted future actually changes: the action delta $\Delta a$ between the future-conditioned and future-free execution paths of the same model. Under a shared WAM checkpoint, this delta barely shifts average benchmark success ($+0.8$ points on LIBERO, $-0.8$ on RoboTwin~2.0), while generating visual futures increases inference latency by 1.7--1.9$\times$. These aggregate metrics conceal a concentrated failure mode …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39278 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Predicting future physical states stands as a central challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing video world models leave 3D dynamics implicit, action-based formulations remain tied to specific robot configurations, and 3D motion prediction models use flow-only supervision, providing a limited learning signal for physical dynamics. To circumvent these limitations, we introduce \method{}, a generative world model that jointly predicts future video and query-based 3D trajectories. By parameterizing 3D motion as continuous displacement tokens aligned with the video grid, a unified …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39232 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Embodied world models should not only imagine plausible futures, but also perceive the geometric, semantic, and motion structure of the evolving world. We present GenSight, a unified embodied world model that brings future video generation and dense perception into a single pretrained video diffusion transformer. GenSight uses a unified spatiotemporal representation for video, depth, embodiment segmentation, and first-frame-relative 2D flow. Built on a shared DiT backbone, GenSight uses lightweight task modulation to predict all modalities within the same architecture. All tasks are jointly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37891 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

On PushT, our fixed action updater (1,505 parameters) solves 8 of 16 scenes reserved from our configuration selection. The comparison planners perform as follows: Selected Adam (7 tasks solved, total planning and encoding time 218.440s), adapted iCEM (2 tasks solved, total planning and encoding time 49.309s), released LePlanner (16 tasks solved, total planning and encoding time 5.652s). The total planning and encoding time for our action updater is 59.079s. Note that our action updater does not satisfy the task-cost criterion we fixed before evaluation. We also conduct another matched …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15768 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37518 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Multi-robot control requires integrating distributed camera views while predicting separate action sequences. Most vision-language-action and world-action models target one robot. Combining multiple views alone does not establish spatial correspondence between them. World Dreamer v5-lite is a multi-robot world-action model built around a shared world state for robot-specific action prediction. Calibrated features from a pretrained video encoder populate this state in workspace coordinates; its spatial size remains fixed as views are added. A vision-language model provides scene context and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37219 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

The vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) communities debate whether control policies should inherit pretrained knowledge from vision-language models or from visual generators. The debate, however, bundles three separable choices: backbone initialization, the objective applied to future observations, and whether the machinery for that future loss is kept at inference. A gap between a VLA and a WAM therefore cannot simply be attributed to any one of them. We show that decoupling these choices yields a common framework for both families, which we term Just Action Model …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37196 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) predict the visual consequences of the actions they generate, which makes test-time selection a natural way to improve a fixed policy: imagine the futures of candidate actions and execute the best one. The benefit of selection is bounded by the selectable headroom, how much better the best candidate truly is, but the standard estimate, which executes each candidate once and keeps the best outcome, conflates candidate quality with the randomness of everything that follows. We introduce a denoised counterfactual protocol, based on bitwise-reproducible branching, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37091 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

World-action models (WAMs) incorporate the prediction of future observations into robot policy learning. However, most WAMs build on billion-parameter vision-language or video-generation backbones, which incur high training cost and inference latency. In this letter, we present GAWM (Geometry-Aware World Model), a compact multi-task WAM that predicts future observations in the latent space of a frozen DINOv3 encoder. GAWM compresses the features of each camera view into a small set of tokens. A lightweight predictor, conditioned on the task rather than on actions, forecasts these tokens at …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36840 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) learn representations for robot control by coupling future visual prediction with action generation. Successful manipulation depends primarily on how the robot and task-relevant objects evolve, whereas future-video prediction must also reconstruct the appearance and background of the entire scene. We therefore propose Trace-WAM, which augments video-action learning with future 3D motion prediction as an auxiliary objective. This objective supervises temporal point correspondence together with image-plane displacement and depth change, directly describing the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36791 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Learning controllable world dynamics from heterogeneous interaction videos is challenging because robot embodiments use incompatible action spaces, while human videos lack native control labels. We present RynnWorld-Latent, a cross-embodiment video world model that uses the 3D-grounded latent actions introduced by RynnLAM as a shared conditioning interface. This representation enables joint pretraining on human interaction videos, robot demonstrations, and simulation rollouts without requiring a common native action space. Built on a pretrained video transformer, RynnWorld-Latent combines …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36662 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) enable world models to plan from images by predicting future embeddings. However, their visual prediction objectives do not explicitly incorporate task-relevant state information, so the physical state that determines task progress may not be reliably captured in the latent space. Supervising world models with simulator state can make planning more informative, but it requires deciding which state features matter. Features are typically selected by hand or weighted uniformly, and a uniform weighting gives every standardized state feature equal …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36624 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video generative models for robotic control by jointly predicting future visual observations and actions. The visual prediction objective plays a key role in adapting pretrained video representations to the target robot domain. Yet standard visual prediction inherited from video pretraining treats all visual regions uniformly, despite their differing relevance to robotic control. We therefore investigate the spatial allocation of visual supervision in WAMs and show that focusing supervision on dynamic regions can substantially improve policy …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36068 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Action-conditioned world models offer a scalable alternative to costly real-world interaction for improving robot policies. However, existing world-model-based methods largely treat world models as forward-only surrogates of the physical environment, leaving untapped a capability no physical environment affords: rewinding to past decision points to explore counterfactual futures. We introduce Rollback, a policy improvement paradigm that turns world models from passive simulators into counterfactual engines: it rolls back to critical decision points, branches into alternative actions, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36011 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

World-action models (WAMs) offer a promising framework for embodied intelligence, yet mainstream approaches remain centered on video foundation models or vision-language models. Even when geometric features extracted by 3D models such as VGGT are incorporated, they are typically passed into a video model or VLM that serves as the primary backbone, leaving 3D geometry as an auxiliary input or prediction target rather than the native foundation for world modeling. We present E0.5, a geometry-native world-action model built directly on 3D foundation models. E0.5 introduces two key innovations. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35877 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Changing a deployment policy can invalidate a world model's uncertainty while leaving the physical transition mechanism and predictor unchanged. For one-step prediction, if source and target laws share the conditional mechanism $P(Y|X)=Q(Y|X)$, then the intervention is identified by the pre-outcome change of measure $w(X)=dQ_X/dP_X$. For policy-controlled dynamics this ratio factors into state-occupancy and action-propensity terms. Weighted conformal calibration transports marginal coverage to the target law; with an estimated ratio $\hat w$, $P_Q\{Y \in C_{\hat w}(X)\} \ge 1-\alpha-TV(Q,\hat …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35850 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Direct-policy World Action Models (WAM) have demonstrated the benefits of decoupling action generation from explicit future visual prediction for efficient inference in autonomous driving and embodied control. However, they still require tens of denoising steps to achieve competitive action quality, incurring substantial latency and hindering real-time deployment. Simply reducing the number of denoising steps will collapse the nonlinear multi-step denoising trajectory into coarse updates, substantially degrading action quality. To reduce the denoising steps while enabling real-time action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35832 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can control robots without robot-specific training, but how their capabilities compare and interact with post-trained vision-language-action (VLA) and world action model (WAM) policies across manipulation demands remains to be thoroughly evaluated. In this report, we evaluate GPT-6-Astra on EBench as the core of an agent that controls a robot through an agent harness under the same visual and proprioceptive observation protocol as post-trained policies. We study two agent configurations: direct control, in which the agent generates waypoint …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35636 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Latent world models are typically pre-trained offline and kept frozen at test time, so planning with them can degrade under distribution shift. Test-time adaptation (TTA) can mitigate this degradation by updating the model during deployment. Unlike pre-training on fixed data, TTA for planning is closed-loop: the planner uses model rollouts to select actions, and the resulting transitions drive the next update. This raises the question: which objective should guide TTA for planning? Under a prediction-only objective, the model is fit only to the outcomes of its own actions, so it can remain …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35044 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

World models are emerging as a fundamental component of policy learning for real-world agents, enabling agents to predict future world states and plan actions within a learned representation of the dynamic environment. Existing approaches, however, often model appearance, metric geometry represented by projected LiDAR depth, and ego motion either partially or independently, overlooking the fact that these modalities are different projections of a shared underlying world state. This separation can lead to information loss and cross-modal inconsistency, ultimately limiting downstream …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34663 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Video world models trained on large-scale robot data promise a safe and scalable approach for learning and evaluating policies that act in the physical world. However, they still struggle with long-horizon rollouts and out-of-distribution generalization, and they remain computationally demanding at inference time. Typically, video world models make predictions in the latent space of a reconstruction-trained autoencoder, which however is not directly optimized for dynamics modeling. On the other hand, world models designed for latent planning usually optimize latents to be predictable, but …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34650 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Assistive agents in shared-control settings face a dual challenge: acting proactively to align with the human's intentions while remaining legible enough for the human to comprehend and fluently respond in real time. We present Dream2Assist, a model-based reinforcement learning framework for tightly-coupled shared decision making that addresses both sides of this challenge. Our approach extends a recurrent state-space world model with intent inference, enabling an assistive policy trained via fictitious co-play to anticipate and support discrete human objectives without overriding human …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34649 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34593 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) combine future-video prediction with robot action learning, yet improvements in task success alone do not reveal how predictive supervision manifests in execution behavior or whether its benefits persist under task and environmental shifts. We conduct controlled future-video prediction loss ablations within FastWAM and OpenWAM, keeping model architecture, initialization, robot training data, and training steps fixed within each model family. Under clean conditions on seen tasks, predictive supervision increases success rates by 24.38 and 72.91 percentage points, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34126 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots have recently achieved remarkable success in motion tracking. However, during real-world deployment, robots inevitably encounter dynamics gaps arising from either extra physical disturbances or inaccurate simulation modeling, resulting in a significant training-deployment gap. Therefore, effectively leveraging real-world data to fine-tune policies represents the crucial last mile for robust deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose HumanoidNDM, an online fine-tuning framework for humanoid motion tracking driven by a real-world-trained neural dynamics model. First, in the data …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33807 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Video world models (VWMs) are rapidly emerging as scalable neural simulators for robotic manipulation. However, most benchmarks only evaluate them as open-world video generators, using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that lack strict 3D spatial and kinematic reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboWorM, a comprehensive, deployment-aware benchmark that leverages known hardware priors such as robot kinematic trees and fixed camera configurations, to systematically examine structural and spatiotemporal fidelity. RoboWorM curates 1,605 episodes across single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33565 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Robot policy evaluation informs deployment decisions and policy improvement, but physical testing and simulator preparation require substantial effort. World models offer a complementary route through closed-loop interaction in generated environments. Recent benchmarks have demonstrated their potential as policy evaluators through outcome-based evaluation (i.e., assessing task success or failure). However, such evaluation does not establish whether world models faithfully simulate how policies fail. Misrepresenting failures can lead to incorrect diagnoses of policy weaknesses and make …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32554 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Zero-shot object navigation requires an embodied agent to choose where to search while retaining evidence from previous observations. HGWM couples an LLM-generated room-anchor prior with persistent spatial-semantic memory. A coarse stage assigns visual-semantic scores to candidate headings on a 0-10 scale; a fine stage measures symbolic compatibility between observed objects, room context, and the goal prior. Phase-dependent fusion combines these scores with an LLM direction recommendation before local action selection. On HM3D v0.1, the reported HGWM configuration achieves 62.6% success rate …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31617 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Tasks such as quadrotor dynamic-gate racing require agents to anticipate external motion while maintaining precise high-frequency control. World-model-based reinforcement learning provides a natural solution by learning latent dynamics for future imagination, yet it often entangles environmental evolution and the robot's own dynamics in a single learned rollout, where model bias can affect policy optimization efficiency. We propose DiffDreamer, a differentiable reinforcement learning framework that tightly couples a learned world model with differentiable simulation for actor optimization. In …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31474 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Robot world models simulate how environments evolve in response to robot actions. Latent action models enable learning dynamics from videos by encoding visual transitions as proxy actions. However, reconstruction-driven latent actions mix robot motion with object responses and other scene changes, complicating their correspondence with robot controls. We propose SkeLAM, a skeleton-guided latent action model for controllable robot world modeling. SkeLAM decomposes latent actions into a kinematic component grounded by robot skeleton supervision and a residual component retaining complementary …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31194 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models in latent space, enabling efficient planning but leaving their states opaque. We introduce Inside-JEPA, which places relational channels for ordered entity pairs inside the JEPA latent state and shows that an inverse-dynamics loss can ground these channels without relation labels when its head reads them, either alone or as part of the full state. On Something-Something V2, latent prediction alone performs no better than a random relation head, while inverse-dynamics supervision that recovers actions from channel changes …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30991 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Robot demonstrations record what the robot saw and what it did. They do not specify how the 3D world changed in between. Scene-level 3D flow describes it by tracking 3D scene points, providing the world representation with 4D geometry. Prior work has used flow to improve robot policies. Flow served as an intermediate prediction that a separate model converts into actions, as a prior injected at inference time, or as an extra output learned together with the action. In all of these designs, flow stays outside the policy, as a separate module or as an extra prediction head. We introduce …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30988 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Robust manipulation of soft objects, such as garments, is a critical skill for service and household robots to adopt, but remains challenging due to its high-dimensional state space, and material-dependent deformations. Humans address this challenge by using mental world models that "imagine" the shape and material properties from partial observations, which enables them to predict how actions affect future states. As such, embedding such world models in robots allows for better generalization in manipulating a wide variety of garments in the real world. However, learned world models …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30781 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Before acting on an object, a robot needs to anticipate how its hand motion will change the physical world and what the resulting scene will look like. Existing approaches typically entangle action-conditioned dynamics, camera motion, and visual synthesis within a video generation model, or represent dynamics as point trajectories without explicit object structure. We introduce DeXplicit, a dexterous manipulation world model that instead predicts how the world evolves explicitly in metric 3D before rendering its visual consequences. Given an initial scene and a future hand trajectory, a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30320 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising approach to learning generalist robot policies using rich spatiotemporal priors from pre-trained video diffusion models. A recent line of WAMs improves inference efficiency by conditioning a separate action decoder on intermediate future video representations extracted from a single denoising step, avoiding costly iterative denoising required for video generation. This design makes action prediction depend directly on the quality of these future representations. In this paper, we introduce Future REpresentation learning via …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30136 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Recent world action models provide visual foresight and future prediction for robot manipulation, but lack explicit mechanisms for compositional skill reuse. Agentic robotics combines code-based planning and reasoning with reusable skills, but often lacks predictive grounding in physical dynamics. We introduce AW-0, an agentic world action model framework that integrates code-based planning with joint video and action prediction. We jointly model code, future video, and robot actions as three coupled generative streams within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. Within this …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30125 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Existing world models typically perceive a scene through current visual frame or a narrow history window. However, these observations may not reveal the physics properties that determine transition dynamics, such as an object's mass distribution, joint damping, or surface friction. Without calibrating these physics factors for world models, predictions tend to regress toward an empirical prior and induce severe drift in novel test scenes. To this end, we propose PhysiCalWorld, which calibrates action-conditioned world models to the instance-specific dynamics via in-context prompting, without …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30117 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Force-sensitive manipulation requires contact and load information that is not provided explicitly by visual observations. We present CW-WAM, a world action model that jointly predicts video, motion, and contact wrench. Inspired by hybrid motion-force control, it contains a unified interaction module that treats both motion and contact wrench as modeling targets and predicts time-aligned motion-wrench chunks as control references. A pair-causal attention mechanism structures the motion-wrench dependencies, while a long fixed-length wrench memory retains past interaction information. The …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29282 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

World Action Models (WAMs) have shown strong potential for robot manipulation by jointly learning visual dynamics and executable actions. However, their video and action objectives do not explicitly constrain the 3D geometry that is crucial for precise manipulation. Recently, geometry-aware WAMs introduce depth or 4D prediction branches, whereas representation alignment methods supervise intermediate WAM features with pretrained 3D foundation models. Yet we find that such pointwise alignment benefits the video features but degrades action learning, since dense geometric feature targets overly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29168 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

World action models (WAMs) are shown to substantially diverge under generalization performance based on their generative backbones. We investigate this gap through the representational geometry that WAMs inherit from their backbones and how policy training reorganizes it. Our central hypothesis is that a useful representational prior would structure geometry that separates nuisance information from the in-distribution manifold in advance of training as a policy. We quantify this with nuisance orthogonality; orthogonality of the feature under visual variation outside the empirical …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29088 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

World models predict how embodied systems evolve under actions, but their accuracy can degrade when physical conditions move outside the training distribution. We study two components of causal modeling: which inputs a predictor may use, and how its mechanism computes their effects. In a synthetic benchmark with shortcut features, a frozen dependency mask derived from paired interventions reduces mean out-of-distribution (OOD) RMSE from 1.769 for a fully connected predictor to 0.697, close to the generator-oracle mask (0.694). For robot link-mass extrapolation in CausalWorld, with disjoint …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28626 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, where each modality is both a conditioning signal and a supervision target. We ask: can jointly generating language enrich this shared representation, improving manipulation and supporting memory-dependent behavior? Unlike prior approaches that attach a reasoning or vision-language model to a video-action backbone and run them as distinct stages, UniWALM unifies all …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28613 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Evaluating and post-training robot policies through physical interaction is costly and difficult to scale, motivating action-conditioned world models as interactive simulators. However, visually plausible predictions can misrepresent contact dynamics, providing unreliable feedback for policy evaluation and learning. We introduce PhysCanvas, a state-consistent visuo-tactile world model for contact-rich robot manipulation. PhysCanvas unifies multi-view RGB, tactile images, marker displacement, task state, and actions within a unified vision space. All modalities share a video VAE and pretrained …