arXiv Computer Vision

CST-WM: A Causally Structured World Model for Embodied Visual Tracking

CST‑WM is a causally structured world model designed for embodied visual tracking, where a robot must keep a moving target visible and recover it after occlusion or drift. The model separates state into target‑evidence, robot, and observation branches, removing direct action‑to‑target‑evidence edges to prevent causal hallucination and instead letting actions influence evidence through robot motion and resulting views. Evaluated on EVT‑Bench, Habitat 3.0, and real‑world trials with a Unitree Go2 quadruped, CST‑WM outperforms reactive trackers and other world‑model baselines in following, distance control, safety, and re‑acquisition, achieving 20 of 30 successful real‑world recoveries versus 14 for TrackVLA.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

ForeTime-VLA: Causal Future-Token Distillation from a World Action Model for Conveyor-Belt Manipulation

ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference. whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."

By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 20

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5: A Behavior World Model for Robust Whole-Body Control with Environment Interaction

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 is a Behavior World Model that uses a causal Transformer to predict next actions, states, and a distribution over latent behavior commands for humanoid whole-body control. It incorporates an automatic terrain-annotation pipeline to recover 3D contact geometry from motion data, allowing the model to learn how terrain and objects influence dynamics. The system detects implausible commands online, retracts them onto learned behaviors, and achieves high success rates in terrain interaction, command robustness, and fall recovery, with promising hardware trials on different robots.

By Ziyang Cheng, Tianshu Tang, Jinxin Lan, Xinze Chen, Yuhan Gong, Zhichao Liu, Changzhong Wu, Yahao Mao, Zongyan Deng, Mingxuan Ma, Huasen Xi, Yilong Liu, Yutong Wu, Xiaofeng Wang, Yang Wang, Yun Ye, Guan Huang, Xiaojie Jin, Zheng Zhu, Jiwen Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

LM-X: Explainable Vision--Language--Action Modeling via Progress, Event, and Uncertainty Prediction

arXiv:2608.25757v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale vision--language--action (VLA) policies have advanced generalist robot control, yet most remain stimulus-to-action black boxes: a...

By Jin Lou, Zhiyuan Jing, Xupeng Wang, Andong Chen, Xingdong Zhu, Yuexuan Li, Yuan Xu, Zhijie Zhu, Yingwei Ji, Wenpeng Nie, Renxing Feng, Liangliang Chen, Ying Chu, Jingyi Li, Jinyan Liu, Zhiqi Song, Jingxuan Zhu, Jidong Zhang, Yufei Liu, Boyang Xing, Lei Jiang, Yan Cui, Hongming Li, Yuchen Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

PACT-WAM: Predicting Actions and Visual Foresight with Compact Temporal Encoding for Robot Manipulation

PACT‑WAM is a world‑action model that simultaneously predicts a 16‑step action trajectory and its corresponding visual forecast for robot manipulation. It uses a hierarchical history encoder that compresses past observations into fewer tokens, reducing processing cost by 75% compared to dense encoding. The model’s shared flow module updates action and visual states jointly, and a TiTok‑VAE decoder reconstructs multi‑view future images, which are then used by a vision‑language component (Proposal Review) to improve execution‑prefix selection and proposal rejection, boosting success rates on several benchmarks.

By Yushan Liu, Jingjing Fan, Shoujie Li, Yifan Xie, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Wenbo Ding
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

FIRM-WM: State-factorized factual-interventional recurrent modeling for reward-free visual planning

FIRM-WM is a compact pixel world model that separates a goal‑comparable configuration from a 128‑dimensional dynamic fiber, enabling reward‑free visual planning from offline videos. It addresses two key mismatches: aligning planning states with goal images and reconciling factual trajectories with interventional sampling. In experiments, FIRM‑WM achieves high success rates on TwoRoom, Reacher, and OGBench‑Cube while using fewer parameters and faster planning times than prior models.

By Yilun Wu, Yunjian Zhang, Aobo Li, Mujiangshan Wang, Haitao Wu, Aqiang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

CSWAM: Better Causal Semantic Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in World Action Models

The paper introduces CSWAM, a Causal Semantic World Action Model that enhances FastWAM by integrating a causal semantic expert based on V-JEPA 2.1. This expert provides temporally grounded, appearance‑agnostic representations of semantic state changes and motion, leveraging sparse observation history and causal attention to improve action‑only inference. Experiments on simulation and real‑robot tasks show that CSWAM significantly boosts out‑of‑distribution generalization, raising success rates from 10.16% to 45.18% on RoboTwin 2.0 and from 27.5% to 70.0% across real‑robot tasks.

By Tianbin Liu, Jian Zhu, Taiyi Su, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Zitai Huang, Yi Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 3

FBFM: A Training-Free Asynchronous Feedback Mechanism for Flow-Matching in World-Action Models Execution

arXiv:2607. 29235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although world-action models (WAMs) enhance long-horizon robot control by predicting visual evolution before acting, long-horizon reliability demands repeated re-grounding in real observations--not recursive rollout.

By Peize Li, Ruimeng Zhang, Ru Zhang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

LM-X: Explainable Action Modeling with Progress, Event, and Uncertainty Prediction for Generalist Robot Manipulation

LM‑X is a generalist vision‑language‑action policy that augments action prediction with three online, explicitly supervised signals: return‑to‑go (RTG) for task progress, event‑to‑go (ETG) for the next semantic transition, and heteroscedastic action flow for local reliability. By conditioning action generation on these signals, LM‑X embeds explainability directly into control rather than as a post‑hoc explanation. After a 20‑day pretraining run on 64 GPUs, LM‑X outperforms an action‑only backbone by 16.0 points and a single‑head variant by 10.8 points, and achieves 74.1 % success on 50 RoboTwin2.0 tasks and 68.6 % on seven real‑robot tasks, surpassing the GR00T N1.7 baseline.

By Jin Lou, Jingxuan Zhu, Andong Chen, Xupeng Wang, Yuan Xu, Yuexuan Li, Xingdong Zhu, Zhijie Zhu, Yingwei Ji, Wenpeng Nie, Jingyi Li, Liangliang Chen, Jinyan Liu, Zhiqi Song, Jidong Zhang, Hongming Li, Yuchen Zhu