arXiv Computer Vision

What Matters for World Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models?

arXiv AI
Sep 10

WorldAgen: Unified State-Action Prediction with Test-Time World Model Training

WorldAgen is a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction using a shared Transformer backbone with two specialized heads. It introduces a Mixed Unidirectional Attention Mask to separate the world model and agent model, and enables Test-Time Training (TTT) by sampling exploratory actions and updating the world model with real state transitions. Experiments on CALVIN and LIBERO show that WorldAgen matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods, especially when TTT is applied to a few samples.

By Chi Wan, Kangrui Wang, Yuan Si, Pingyue Zhang, Manling Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

WorldBagel: Uncovering the Power of Unified Multimodal Models for Vision-Language-Action-World Modeling

arXiv:2607. 03461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models aim to capture environment dynamics in ways that support perception, reasoning, and action, and have recently become a central direction in Vision-Language-Action-World (VLAW) modeling.

By Zelin Zhao, Min Shi, Bo Yuan, Haotian Xue, Jialuo Li, Lama Moukheiber, Humphrey Shi, Yongxin Chen
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
6d ago

Vision-Language-Action or World-Action? Just Action Models

The paper introduces the Just Action Model (JAM), a framework that decouples backbone initialization, future observation objectives, and inference machinery to unify vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) approaches. JAM employs a pretrained visual backbone, an action expert, an action loss, and a foresight loss that predicts future encodings without visual generation, discarding the prediction head after training. Experiments show JAM outperforms FastWAM and ImageWAM on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin, while reducing online training FLOPs by 73%.

By Yonghao Yu, Lang Huang, Runyi Li, Toshihiko Yamasaki
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 22

ALPS: Visual State Encoders for World Models

The paper introduces ALPS, a pretrained visual state encoder that integrates physical-state information, native language alignment, and pixel reconstruction into a single representation. Trained from scratch on still images and text, ALPS uses language, reconstruction, and spatial correspondence objectives, followed by cross-view self‑distillation. In evaluations across fifteen encoders, ALPS achieves the lowest aggregate LIBERO state‑probe error among ViT‑B models, while also delivering strong language alignment, accurate pixel reconstruction, and high policy success in downstream world‑model tasks.

By Yanqing Liu, Letian Zhang, Chengzhi Liu, Zijun Wang, Jieru Mei, Hongliang Fei, Yuyin Zhou, Cihang Xie
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey

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 AI
Sep 28

VLANeXt Family: A Systematic Study of VLA Models from Core Recipes to Emerging Paradigms

The paper presents VLANeXt, a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model built from a unified framework that systematically analyzes design choices across foundational components, perception essentials, and action modeling. By dissecting these dimensions, the authors identify 12 key findings that form a practical recipe for strong VLA models, and demonstrate that VLANeXt outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on LIBERO and LIBERO‑plus benchmarks while also excelling in real‑world experiments. The study further extends VLANeXt into a family of variants—scaled models, latent‑action pretraining, latent predictive representation learning, and world action modeling—showing that the core recipe remains effective across different scales and emerging paradigms.

By Xiao-Ming Wu, Kang Liao, Yihang Luo, Bin Fan, Jian-Jian Jiang, Runze Yang, Zhonghua Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Chen Change Loy