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
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: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
Conventional visual navigation policies often struggle with myopic decision-making and mode collapse in complex environments. While world models offer a promising alternative, existing paradigms typically isolate perception, generation, and control, failing to capture their shared spatio-temporal dynamics.
WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.
By Mingkai Jia, Jiaxin Guo, Zhijian Shu, Jiawei Xu, Mingxiao Li, Jintao Cheng, Ping Tan, Wei Yin
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:2607. 00836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models are increasingly used in embodied intelligence and generative simulation, yet their scope remains ambiguous across communities.
By Xiaoxiong Zhang, Xiong Zeng, Wei Zhang
arXiv:2610.27851v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This paper shows that JEPA-style latent world models (LWMs) can learn across diverse domains and data sources by adopting the language-conditioned in...
By Junha Song, Geonmo Gu, Jeongeun Park, Heejeong Nam, Lucas Maes, Byeongho Heo, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
FutureWorlds is a framework that learns robotic world models by generating alternative future predictions and using them as learning signals. It combines candidate construction, history maintenance, and learning from relative quality through a multimodal discrete autoregressive model and diverse beam search. The MemSPO algorithm further optimizes the world model by converting video trajectory rewards into group-relative advantages, leading to significant improvements in LPIPS scores across RT-1, BridgeV2, and RoboCasa datasets.
By Hao Wu, Shengju Qian, Weiyan Wang, Fan Xu, Fan Zhang, Yuanpeng He, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang
Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on an unverified assumption: generated futures faithful...
The paper introduces Hindsight Inverse JEPA Planning (HIJP), a search‑free framework that replaces costly online action sequence optimization with a goal‑conditioned inverse model. HIJP trains by relabeling future observations as goals, providing action supervision across multiple horizons and shaping visual representations. The method also aligns predicted actions with a latent predictor model to enforce action‑transition consistency, achieving high success rates and significant speedups on visual control tasks.
By Guanchen Du, Jinhao Du, Yanpeng Sun, Shan Zhang, Na Zhao, Zechao Li
arXiv:2606.20627v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) enable agents to plan in latent space by imagining the outcomes of candidate actions, yet task spe...
By Samuel Barbeau, Simon Roy, Giovanni Beltrame, Christian Desrosiers, Nicolas Thome