ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference.
whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."
By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang
CST‑WM is a causally structured world model designed for embodied visual tracking, where a robot must keep a moving target visible and recover it after occlusion or drift. The model separates state into target‑evidence, robot, and observation branches, removing direct action‑to‑target‑evidence edges to prevent causal hallucination and instead letting actions influence evidence through robot motion and resulting views. Evaluated on EVT‑Bench, Habitat 3.0, and real‑world trials with a Unitree Go2 quadruped, CST‑WM outperforms reactive trackers and other world‑model baselines in following, distance control, safety, and re‑acquisition, achieving 20 of 30 successful real‑world recoveries versus 14 for TrackVLA.
By Junyi Hu, Shuaihang Yuan, Jiazhao Liang, Yi Fang
arXiv:2608.30378v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Direct vision-language-action policies generate continuous robot actions efficiently, but standard behavior cloning leaves two complementary gaps: th...
By Botong Zhao, Fang Yu, Tim, Senhua Zhu, Xinyuan Chen, Yue Lu
arXiv:2607. 29235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although world-action models (WAMs) enhance long-horizon robot control by predicting visual evolution before acting, long-horizon reliability demands repeated re-grounding in real observations--not recursive rollout.
By Peize Li, Ruimeng Zhang, Ru Zhang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv:2609.37398v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World-Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with predictions of how physical interactions unfold. However, current post-deployment learning par...
By Xiangcheng Zhan, Zirui Chen, Yicheng Zhao, Ziteng Gao, Shuo Yang
PACT‑WAM is a world‑action model that simultaneously predicts a 16‑step action trajectory and its corresponding visual forecast for robot manipulation. It uses a hierarchical history encoder that compresses past observations into fewer tokens, reducing processing cost by 75% compared to dense encoding. The model’s shared flow module updates action and visual states jointly, and a TiTok‑VAE decoder reconstructs multi‑view future images, which are then used by a vision‑language component (Proposal Review) to improve execution‑prefix selection and proposal rejection, boosting success rates on several benchmarks.
By Yushan Liu, Jingjing Fan, Shoujie Li, Yifan Xie, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Wenbo Ding
DELE-w0.5 is a robotic manipulation framework that predicts future latent states instead of generating full video sequences, thereby inferring robot actions directly from these compact representations. By focusing on physical state changes rather than visual transitions, it reduces model complexity and inference latency. In 480 real‑robot trials across four long‑horizon tasks, DELE‑w0.5 achieved 62.5 % overall task success and 81.3 % macro ordered‑stage progress, outperforming the strongest baseline by 47.5 and 30.7 percentage points.
By Fenghao Lei, Zhixiong Huang, Long Yang, Jiabao Chen, Peilin Huang, Han Fu, Zhuo Li, Xiaoxue Ren
arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv:2609.37250v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) couple future visual-state prediction with action generation. By adapting video generators or image-editing models pretrai...
By Yang Zhang, Jiangyuan Zhao, Chenyou Fan, Jiayu Hu, Xiu Yuan, Chenjia Bai, Xiu Li
arXiv:2608.29937v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Latent world-action models avoid rendering future pixels by predicting an action-relevant visual subgoal in feature space. LaWAM established this formu...
By Yafei Zhang, Nan Wu
arXiv:2602. 13977v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to unlock capabilities beyond imitation learning for Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models, but its requirement for massive real-world interaction prevents direct deployment on physical robots.
By Zhennan Jiang, Shangqing Zhou, Yutong Jiang, Zefang Huang, Mingjie Wei, Yuhui Chen, Tianxing Zhou, Zhen Guo, Hao Lin, Quanlu Zhang, Yu Wang, Haoran Li, Chao Yu, Dongbin Zhao
arXiv:2609.10506v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Action-conditioned latent world models predict future visual representations, enabling zero-shot goal-conditioned robot planning and control. However...
By Nisarga Nilavadi, Ralf R\"omer, Moritz Reuss, Michael Krawez, Tobias J\"ulg, Angela P. Schoellig, Rudolf Lioutikov, Wolfram Burgard