The paper investigates how causal modeling can improve the robustness of world models to physical parameter shifts. By freezing a dependency mask derived from paired interventions, the authors reduce out‑of‑distribution RMSE on a synthetic benchmark from 1.769 to 0.697, nearly matching an oracle mask. In a robotic link‑mass extrapolation task, incorporating explicit affine coefficients for mass effects and using a known PD controller yields a consistent predictive gain, raising median joint R² from 0.609 to 0.727 across all runs, while a learned‑torque model competes with the best recurrent world model when out‑of‑range masses are supplied.
By Chu Lin, Yi Sun
The paper introduces a feedback world model that updates predictions online using the robot’s observed next state after each action, thereby closing the loop between prediction and observation. This lightweight feedback state corrects future predictions without extra training or parameter updates, and the authors provide convergence guarantees under bounded dynamics residuals. Experiments on LIBERO‑Plus, Robomimic, and real‑world tasks show significant reductions in prediction error (up to 76.4%) and improved policy performance, even when applied to pretrained foundation models like Fast‑WAM‑Joint.
By Tuo An, Jindou Jia, Gen Li, Jingliang Li, Chuhao Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Bofan Lyu, Jiaqi Bai, Xinying Guo, Geng Li, Jianfei Yang
arXiv:2610.16443v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent world action models draw on video generation priors to jointly predict future observations and robot actions. Adapting these priors to control r...
By Yuanpeng He, Ceyao Zhang, Fangjing Li, Kefei Zhu, Lijian Li, Yueheng Li, Tianjia He, Wenpin Jiao, Zhi Jin, Yaodong Yang, Yuanpei Chen
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
arXiv:2610.10528v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-time robot control demands enough visual history to infer motion and task progress, but processing that history can delay action. We present Lon...
By Wei Huang, Bohan Zhang, Chenzhi Liu, Isabella Liu, Shuai Yang, Weian Mao, Luozhou Wang, Yicheng Xiao, Weifeng Lin, Qixin Hu, Bryan Chu, Sifei Liu, Linxi Fan, Xiaojuan Qi, Song Han, Yukang Chen
arXiv:2609.00161v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World models have made remarkable progress in action-conditioned future prediction for embodied agents, yet still struggle to model physically plausibl...
By Rongze Tang, Jianjie Fang, Zhaolu Wang, Ziyou Wang, Xvyuan Liu, Haisheng Su, Xin Zhang, Wei Wu, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Zhibo Chen
Changepoint-Aware World Models (CAWM) is a DreamerV3 agent that detects abrupt dynamics shifts in a robot’s environment using an online CUSUM test on internal prediction error. Upon detection, CAWM selectively forgets stale replay data while preserving the learned representation, enabling rapid recovery from shifts such as doubled gravity or halved actuator gain. Experiments on simulated locomotion show CAWM recovers faster than passive retraining and outperforms a baseline that respawns a fresh dynamics model, achieving significant return gains in the first 30k post‑shift frames.
By Everest Yang
Accurate contact prediction is useful for robotic manipulation only if it supports effective decisions. We investigate this connection using a compact, randomly initialized visuotactile world model, t...
arXiv:2610.07922v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) couple future prediction with robot control, yet existing systems often vary the video backbone, interaction structure, su...
By Heng Yu, David D. Yuan, Juze Zhang, Changan Chen, Yao Feng, Michelle Baldonado, Steve Cousins, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu, Ehsan Adeli
arXiv:2609.01596v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We pre...
By Haoyuan Deng, Haichao Liu, Wenkai Guo, Yuan Ling, Zaijia Yang, Yuanjiang Xue, Haosheng Sun, Liangzi Wang, Ziwei Wang
arXiv:2607. 18715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models underpin much of modern model-based control, yet current action-conditioned formulations supervise the next-latent transition with a single, undifferentiated target, forcing a monolithic learning signal to absorb every source of state change.
By Yi-Ge Zhang, Tianqi Du, Qi Zhang, Yisen Wang
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