The Planning Limits of Latent World Models
arXiv:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
EmbodiedSkills is a skill-based agent framework that enhances frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies with world action models for consequence‑aware action selection. It defines reusable skills for observation, context encoding, candidate generation, consequence prediction, outcome evaluation, candidate comparison, and action execution, organized into five stages that support both continuous action chunks and pick‑and‑place primitives. The framework improves success rates on MetaWorld MT50, CLIPort, and CALVIN benchmarks by incorporating outcome predictions and lightweight comparators while keeping the core policy and observation encoders frozen.
arXiv:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
EmbodiedSkills is a unified framework that treats each skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites and verifying outcomes during long‑horizon vision‑language‑action tasks. It connects high‑level skill selection, bounded low‑level VLA execution, and post‑action verification through a fixed executable‑skill interface, enabling easy replacement of low‑level policies and recording of structured trajectories for supervision and adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3‑VL and OpenPI/pi0.5 on RoboTwin 2.0 and LIBERO, the framework achieves high success rates (86.20% and 97.40% respectively) and demonstrates effective memory‑dependent task performance.
arXiv:2610.16443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent world action models draw on video generation priors to jointly predict future observations and robot actions. Adapting these priors to control r...
The paper surveys 160 benchmarks from 2017‑2026 that evaluate predictive embodied intelligence, categorising them into policy suites, embodied agents, world‑model evaluation, and prediction‑to‑action bridges. It finds that most benchmarks are model‑agnostic, rarely compare Vision‑Language‑Action policies to world models, and seldom turn predictions into executed actions. The authors argue that the lack of benchmarks designed to directly test the closed‑loop advantage of world models prevents the field from answering whether such models truly improve robotic performance.
The paper introduces Action–Future Coupled Effect Learning (AFCE), a method that shifts the primary prediction target of vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies from action chunks to future‑grounded physical Effects. AFCE constructs temporally ordered Effect tokens from demonstrations, robot responses, and visual transitions, and uses reconstruction objectives to preserve executable detail and physical change. On the DexJoCo benchmark, AFCE achieves a 50.97% overall success rate, outperforming baseline policies by 11.82 and 15.21 percentage points and excelling on all five bimanual tasks, underscoring the benefit of Effect supervision for coordinated dexterous manipulation.
arXiv:2605.13119v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are effective robot action executors, but they remain limited on long-horizon tasks due to the dual burde...
arXiv:2608. 06756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models are increasingly serving as the reasoning core of embodied agents.
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.
Prioritized Rollouts for Efficient World Model-based Vision-Language-Action Policy Optimization introduces U‑GROW, a lightweight sampling layer that directs more model rollouts toward states with high policy uncertainty, identified as decision‑sensitive stages where small action differences can alter task outcomes. By modifying only the branched‑start distribution, U‑GROW can be integrated into existing model‑based reinforcement learning pipelines without changing the policy optimization objective. Experiments on simulated and real‑world manipulation tasks demonstrate that U‑GROW improves the efficiency and effectiveness of policy optimization for Vision‑Language‑Action models.
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.
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...
arXiv:2606. 01095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies and World-Action Models (WAM) represent two increasingly important paradigms for robotic manipulation.