arXiv AI

ThinkWorld: World Imagination Reinforces Chain-of-Dynamics Reasoning

arXiv AI
Oct 7

EgoLAP: Learning from Egocentric Human Data through Language-Action Reasoning

EgoLAP is a VLA pre‑training framework that learns from both human and robot trajectories by expressing motion intent as temporally abstracted language actions linked to motion‑level reasoning grounded in scene geometry, physics, and object affordances. It jointly trains on a shared language‑based action chain‑of‑thought, enabling the transfer of human experience to robot control. In extensive real‑world and simulated experiments, EgoLAP achieves 80.1% mean real‑world task progress, a 2.3× improvement over alternative action representations, and outperforms composite reasoning formats.

By Lihan Zha, Shresth Grover, Tenny Yin, Samuel M. Bateman, Hengkai Pan, Mengchao Zhang, Aykut Onol, Allen Z. Ren, Dhruv Shah, Anirudha Majumdar
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

PDRVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Physical Dynamics Representations

PDRVLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model that incorporates a lightweight Physical Dynamics Module to extract physical tokens from vision‑language features, enabling action generation without online video synthesis. The module predicts future RGB, depth, and optical‑flow features, guided by auxiliary supervision from a frozen pretrained video world model. Trained solely on publicly available data augmented with human‑to‑robot synthesis, subtask annotation, and embodied chain‑of‑thought (ECoT) annotation, PDRVLA achieves high success rates across four simulation benchmarks, with ablations demonstrating the benefits of world‑model supervision and various conditioning strategies.

By Hanqing Wang, Zhaotian Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Tao Zhang, Yilin Chen, Xu Jiang, Kaiquan Chen, Chongyang Wu, Haoran Li, Fan Yang, Mingan Lin, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou, Youzheng Wu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey

The survey "World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control" reviews recent advances in coupling future world prediction with executable action generation for robots in open environments. It clarifies the scope of World-Action Models (WAMs) relative to conventional world models, model-based RL, and Vision‑Language‑Action policies, and organizes existing methods through a unified taxonomy covering representations, transition modeling, action interfaces, architectures, training pipelines, data modalities, and scaling strategies. The paper also surveys applications in manipulation, navigation, and autonomous driving, summarizes datasets, benchmarks, and metrics, and discusses key challenges such as action alignment, spatial consistency, long‑horizon memory, and efficient inference.

By Zuxing Lu, Hongjia Zhai, Guanzhi Wang, Huajian Zeng, Jiaqi Yang, Jingyu Liu, Lei Cheng, Yuantai Zhang, Yuheng Qiu, Zezhou Cheng, Ivan Laptev, Danfei Xu, Benjamin Riviere, Giuseppe Loianno, Eric Xing, Xingxing Zuo
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

Native Action-Prior Learning from Videos for World Action Models

The paper introduces NAVA-WAM, a method that learns action priors directly from observation-only videos to pretrain action policies for robots. It uses a two-stage training process: first, it pretrains on videos with future‑video flow‑matching supervision to learn action‑relevant priors, and second, it fine‑tunes with action‑labeled demonstrations for robot control. Experiments show that NAVA‑WAM outperforms previous methods in both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution scenarios, achieving strong action‑label efficiency and real‑robot generalization.

By Zhaochong An, Fei Zhang, Menglin Jia, Duncan Frost, Zijian Zhou, Yikai Wang, Xudong Wang, Aditya Patel, Belinda Zeng, Tao Xiang, Serge Belongie, Amir Bar, Sen He
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

arXiv:2606. 17046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world.

By Jisang Han, Seonghu Jeon, Jaewoo Jung, Ren\'e Zurbr\"ugg, Honggyu An, Tifanny Portela, Marco Hutter, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Towards VLA-Dreamer: Refining VLA Behavior Using World Models

The paper proposes a new architecture for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that improves sample efficiency by training a predictive world model on the vision encoder’s embedding space. It argues that these embeddings are action‑relevant and can be used to predict future states, addressing the lack of an explicit world model in current VLAs. The trained model can also support short‑term planning by sampling actions that lead to desired goal images.

By Parsa Mastouri Kashani, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Stefan Wermter
arXiv AI
Oct 5

World Action Planner: Generalizable Robot Decision-Making with Action-Conditioned World Models

World Action Planner is a robot planning system that uses an action-conditioned world model to search for and compose executable action plans. The agent performs a coarse-to-fine search: first a global action optimization over imagined rollouts to spot potential failures, then a local action search comparing neighboring candidates to pick the best action. In compositional long-horizon tasks, novel object layouts, and real‑robot planning without expert demonstrations, it consistently outperforms state‑of‑the‑art end‑to‑end generalist policies and VLM planners.

By Xiangcheng Zhang, Runhan Huang, Yilun Du