The paper presents a deep active inference framework for real‑world robotic navigation that combines a diffusion policy with a multiple‑timescale recurrent state‑space model. The diffusion policy generates diverse candidate actions, while the state‑space model predicts long‑horizon outcomes, allowing the system to select actions that minimize expected free energy. Experiments show higher success rates and fewer collisions, especially in exploration‑heavy scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of this unified exploration and goal‑directed approach.
arXiv:2609.38383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without po...
arXiv:2608. 14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes.
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.
arXiv:2608. 09876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physically consistent motion planning remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as generated trajectories must strictly conform to real-world execution dynamics.
arXiv:2603. 02650v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion planners are a strong approach for offline reinforcement learning, but they can fail when value-guided selection favours trajectories that score well yet are locally inconsistent with the environment dynamics, resulting in brittle execution.
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.
The paper introduces Spatially Aware World Action Model (SA‑WAM), a diffusion‑based framework that extends existing World Action Models by incorporating depth information alongside RGB to enable 3‑D‑aware action and future‑state prediction. SA‑WAM repurposes a pretrained video diffusion model, using a nonlinear encoding to map unbounded depth into the tokenizer’s bounded domain, thus preserving pretrained visual priors without 3‑D‑specific fine‑tuning. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on RoboCasa and LIBERO‑Plus benchmarks and demonstrates superior real‑world performance on a UR5 robotic arm in randomized environments, while also providing analysis linking world‑model prediction quality to rollout success.
arXiv:2607. 17574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement-learning navigation policies for legged robots select actions reactively from current observations and short-term memory, with limited capacity to anticipate how moving obstacles will evolve in the near future.
The paper introduces UniWM, a unified, memory‑augmented world model that merges egocentric visual foresight and planning into a single multimodal autoregressive backbone. By grounding action selection in visually imagined outcomes and using a hierarchical memory to fuse short‑term perception with long‑term trajectory context, UniWM aligns prediction with control and improves navigation stability. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks and the 1X Humanoid Dataset show up to 30% higher success rates, reduced trajectory errors, zero‑shot generalization to unseen datasets, and scalability to high‑dimensional humanoid navigation.
arXiv:2608. 06994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) aim to construct a unified architecture capable of understanding world state evolution and guiding to generative motion planning.
The paper introduces Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline‑to‑online reinforcement‑learning framework that employs a diffusion policy to produce short‑horizon action chunks for robot crowd navigation. PDPO is pretrained on collision‑avoidance demonstrations and fine‑tuned online with PPO, generating five‑step action sequences applied in a receding‑horizon manner. The authors also identify a benchmark artifact where agents can leave the valid domain without explicit boundary constraints, and they mitigate this by treating boundary violations as collisions, leading to improved success rates over strong baselines.
World models enable agents to reason about future outcomes and learn policies from their knowledge of state transition, but existing approaches primarily focus on reconstructing future observations or...