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
Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.
By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
arXiv:2606. 15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Jialei Chen, Kai Wang, Kang Chen, Shuaihang Chen, Feng Gao, Wenhao Tang, Zhiyuan Li, Weilin Liu, Zhuyu Yao, Boxun Li, Yuanbo Xu, Chao Yu
arXiv:2608.22364v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World action models (WAMs) couple visual future prediction with robot action generation, but accelerated students can lose task capabilities during dis...
By Liuhaichen Yang, Zhuang Jiang, Chenchao Sheng, Zezhi Tang
arXiv:2608. 11605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) couple future visual prediction with robot action generation, enabling policies to model how the physical world evolves during interaction.
By Jiakai Huang, Zhongbo Wu, Zheng Zhang, Zihan Wang, Shan You, Tao Huang
Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task ca...
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:2606. 05979v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose world-language-action (WLA) models as a new class of embodied foundation models.
By Yi Yang, Zhihong Liu, Siqi Kou, Yiyang Chen, Yanzhe Hu, Jianbo Zhou, Boyuan Zhao, Zhijie Wei, Xiao Xia, Xueqi Li, Pengfei Liu, Zhijie Deng
DeltaWAM introduces a new approach to world-action models (WAMs) for bimanual manipulation by jointly predicting visual deltas and actions instead of dense future frames, thereby reducing redundant modeling of unchanged content and mitigating nuisance appearance variations. The method employs three architectures with varying representation and computation sharing, and incorporates Streaming Delta Memory (SDM) to update cached anchor context using compact observed deltas, which cuts heavy video-expert processing. Experiments on RoboTwin show that DeltaWAM with SDM raises average success rates from 81.3% to 85.4% in clean settings and from 75.8% to 83.9% under visual randomization, while also reducing training FLOPs by up to 23.77% and inference latency by 36.57%.
whyItMatters":"DeltaWAM improves both performance and computational efficiency for bimanual manipulation tasks by focusing on visual deltas and efficient memory updates, as demonstrated by higher success rates and lower FLOPs on RoboTwin."
By Han Yan, Zishang Xiang, Haokai Jiang, Zeyu Zhang, Qilin Wang, Weiyu Guo, Yandong Guo, Boxin Shi, Hao Tang
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:2607. 04265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion.
By Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao