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. 17046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world.
By Jisang Han, Seonghu Jeon, Jaewoo Jung, Ren\'e Zurbr\"ugg, Honggyu An, Tifanny Portela, Marco Hutter, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
arXiv:2609.38163v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World-action models jointly learn robot policies and predict future observations, making the representation space an interface between control and pred...
By Haoyi Jiang, Liu Liu, Xinjiang Wang, Zhihao Sun, Zequn Chen, Sen Wang, Xinjie Wang, Xia Chen, Jingfeng Yao, Weiheng Zhao, Shanglin Yuan, Zhizhong Su, Wei Sui, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
arXiv:2606. 09811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning.
By Jisong Cai, Long Ling, Shiwei Chu, Zhongshan Liu, Jiayue Kang, Zhixuan Liang, Wenjie Xu, Yinan Mao, Weinan Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Ru Ying, Ran Zheng, Yao Mu
ZimaBlue is a scalable framework that learns generalizable World Action Models (WAMs) from large-scale egocentric videos. It follows a three-stage curriculum: causal video pre‑training, video‑action mid‑training with a unified action representation, and final specialization to a target robot. The system employs an asynchronous Slow‑Fast architecture to enable real‑time 30 Hz action prediction, achieving a jump in real‑robot zero‑shot success from 36.1% to 77.8% when leveraging over 120,000 hours of embodied video.
By Xionghao Wu, Yijun Yang, Shiyang Zhou, Haoze Sun, Jianhui Liu, Songsong Yu, Jiyao Zhang, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Guoqing Ma, Lin Song, Renjie Liao, Shenghe Zheng, Wei Tang, Xiaojuan Qi, Yanwei Li, Yuan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
The paper proposes a new architecture for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that improves sample efficiency by training a predictive world model on the vision encoder’s embedding space. It argues that these embeddings are action‑relevant and can be used to predict future states, addressing the lack of an explicit world model in current VLAs. The trained model can also support short‑term planning by sampling actions that lead to desired goal images.
By Parsa Mastouri Kashani, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Stefan Wermter
arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
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.
By Javier Alejandro Lopetegui Gonzalez, Paul Pacaud, Cordelia Schmid
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
arXiv:2607. 15065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive world models enable robots to plan by imagining the outcomes of their actions, but their value for control hinges on generating many rollouts quickly.
By Susie Lu, Haonan Chen, Weirui Ye, Yilun Du
arXiv:2608.22067v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot action...
By Fenghao Lei, Zhixiong Huang, Long Yang, Jiabao Chen, Jie Cheng, Peilin Huang, Han Fu, Zhuo Li, Xiaoxue Ren
arXiv:2607. 05468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual future dynamics and executable action sequences.
By Jianjun Zhang, Jian Zhu, Taiyi Su, Chong Ma, Zitai Huang, Yi Xu, Hanli Wang