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:2608.22067v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot action...
By Fenghao Lei, Zhixiong Huang, Long Yang, Jiabao Chen, Jie Cheng, Peilin Huang, Han Fu, Zhuo Li, Xiaoxue Ren
arXiv:2609.38163v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World-action models jointly learn robot policies and predict future observations, making the representation space an interface between control and pred...
By Haoyi Jiang, Liu Liu, Xinjiang Wang, Zhihao Sun, Zequn Chen, Sen Wang, Xinjie Wang, Xia Chen, Jingfeng Yao, Weiheng Zhao, Shanglin Yuan, Zhizhong Su, Wei Sui, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
arXiv:2605. 00412v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning.
By Sen Cui, Jingheng Ma
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
DELE-w0.5 is a robotic manipulation framework that predicts future latent states instead of generating full video sequences, thereby inferring robot actions directly from these compact representations. By focusing on physical state changes rather than visual transitions, it reduces model complexity and inference latency. In 480 real‑robot trials across four long‑horizon tasks, DELE‑w0.5 achieved 62.5 % overall task success and 81.3 % macro ordered‑stage progress, outperforming the strongest baseline by 47.5 and 30.7 percentage points.
By Fenghao Lei, Zhixiong Huang, Long Yang, Jiabao Chen, Peilin Huang, Han Fu, Zhuo Li, Xiaoxue Ren
arXiv:2606. 15032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models have become a central abstraction in modern AI.
By Yang Yu, Shiyuan Zhang, Yifei Sheng, Haoxiang Ren, Haoxin Lin
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:2609.38059v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world robot learning is constrained by the cost of collecting experience and evaluating candidate behaviors. Video generation models offer a sca...
By Shenghe Zheng, Wenbo Li, Jiyao Zhang, Bin Xia, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan, Jiaya Jia
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
World models enable agents to reason about future outcomes and learn policies from their knowledge of state transition, but existing approaches primarily focus on reconstructing future observations or...
The paper introduces a Latent World Model (LWM) for robot navigation that predicts action‑conditioned latent feature compatibility instead of reconstructing future observations. By exploiting the correlation between spatial proximity and latent feature similarity, the model evaluates action consequences directly in latent space and supports counterfactual training using sampled action sequences. The learned world model can supervise policy learning from unlabeled video and further improve policies via reinforcement learning entirely within the model, eliminating the need for action annotations and additional environment interaction.
By Zengmao Wang, Wei Gao, Shuhan Shen