arXiv AI

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

arXiv:2606. 12217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

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 Computer Vision
Sep 24

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.

By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning

arXiv:2608.24885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on a...

By Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu, Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Siyuan Qian, Hao Chen, Jiajun Cao, Jian Tang, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

AffordanceWAM: Affordance-Aware Joint World-Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2609.22332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act...

By Jiadi You, Qize Yu, Yue Chen, Minghong Cai, Zhide Zhong, Yuran Wang, Bowen Ping, Jiaqi Liang, Zhenhao Shen, Haodong Yan, Yinchuan Li, Ruihai Wu, Xiaojuan Qi, Yingcong Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

PoseVLA: Universal Pose Pretraining for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2602. 19710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often suffer from feature collapse and low training efficiency because they entangle high-level perception with sparse, embodiment-specific action supervision.

By Haitao Lin, Hanyang Yu, Jingshun Huang, He Zhang, Yonggen Ling, Ping Tan, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

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