Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.
arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.
By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
VideoGen-Agent is a multimodal agent that uses multitask agentic reinforcement learning to coordinate external tools for video generation. It learns to augment, generate, and verify videos through multi‑turn interactions, guided by prompts and intermediate observations. On the new VABench benchmark, the agent improves base text‑to‑video performance by 19.1 points, and further upgrades to generation tools raise the score to 86.1, with human raters favoring the upgraded configuration in 84.3% of comparisons.
By Binxu Li, Haoyi Duan, Yuhui Zhang, Yaohui Zhang, Zihao Lin, Kaituo Feng, Suozhi Huang, Xiangyi Li, Yu Li, Chunyuan Li, Shilong Liu, Mengdi Wang
Video Prediction Policy 2 (VPP2) is a new world action model that improves zero‑shot generalization for both video prediction and action generation. It achieves this by pretraining a large, diverse manipulation video dataset with event‑level supervision, then distilling the model into a single‑step visual planner and adding a mixture‑of‑transformers action module. Experiments show VPP2 outperforms leading baselines on open‑ended video prediction, real‑world zero‑shot manipulation, and several challenging benchmarks.
By Yanjiang Guo, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Zhongru Zhang, Qingyuan Yang, Qingzhou Lu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Shuying Deng, Chenghan Yang, Puzhen Yuan, Chenxin Liu, Tun Ban, Xiang Zhu, Yichen Liu, Kun Feng, Haoang Li, Jianyu Chen
DreamTrue is a multi‑view, cross‑embodiment robot world model that predicts physically plausible videos while faithfully following actions. It overcomes calibration and limited interaction coverage issues by rendering action trajectories into image‑space conditions, applying offline geometric calibration, and using counterfactual post‑training to generate a broader range of future videos. A human‑annotated defect dataset trains a video reward model that guides reinforcement‑learning post‑training, resulting in state‑of‑the‑art action following on AgiBot and a significant drop in interaction defect rates.
By Junyan Li, Ruizhi Li, Yu Liu, Xiangshuo Liu, Mingchao Sun, Hongyu Pan, Mu Xu, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
arXiv:2605.07079v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual fe...
By Xinyu Zhang, Zhengtong Xu, Yutian Tao, Yeping Wang, Yu She, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv:2609.38057v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Improving robot policies on new tasks without collecting additional expert demonstrations remains a central challenge in robot learning. World action m...
By Shiyang Zhou, Xionghao Wu, Wenbo Li, Shenghe Zheng, Jiyao Zhang, Songsong Yu, Yijun Yang, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Senqiao Yang, Li Jiang, Jingyong Su, Haoyang Huang, Zhuotao Tian
Despite the recent promise in robot control, video generative models suffer from a domain mismatch due to their primary focus on content creation. For example, their design inherently prioritizes visual fidelity and creativity over computational efficiency and physical realism.
arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.
By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
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
PAVXploreRL introduces a reinforcement learning framework that builds on a pretrained latent world model to explicitly optimize Physical Plausibility, Action Adherence, and Visual Fidelity (PAV) objectives. By combining in‑distribution expert trajectories with noise‑driven out‑of‑distribution action exploration, the method avoids reliance on paired video supervision and improves generalization. Experiments demonstrate a 5.6% average performance gain over pretrained baselines and more reliable policy evaluation with reduced overestimation bias.
By Han Wang, Zijun Wang, Shuoshuo Xue, Rui Cao, Fengjiao Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
The paper introduces a reinforcement learning post‑training scheme that trains robot world models on their own autoregressive rollouts, using a contrastive RL objective adapted from diffusion models. It also proposes a training protocol that compares multiple variable‑length futures, a multi‑view visual fidelity reward, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art rollout fidelity on the DROID dataset, outperforming baselines on LPIPS, SSIM, and human preference tests.
By Jai Bardhan, Patrik Drozdik, Josef Sivic, Vladimir Petrik