arXiv Machine Learning

CoWAM: Coordination Contracts for Selective Policy Intervention with WAMs

arXiv:2608. 02578v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned predicted futures, but a plausible future alone does not justify changing the action that a bimanual policy would execute.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

CogWAM: Aligning Semantic Cognition with World Action Modeling via Event-Driven Interfaces

CogWAM is a cognition‑guided world‑action model that links task reasoning with action learning via a persistent Semantic State, which records completed task events and the active subtask. The model updates this state only on semantic transitions, enabling task‑level context to persist across multiple action chunks. During inference, CogWAM removes the future‑prediction branch and directly generates actions from observations and the maintained state, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on RoboDojo and BiCoord and demonstrating efficient closed‑loop dual‑arm manipulation in real‑world experiments.

By Sen Wang, Liu Liu, Xinjiang Wang, Zequn Chen, Haoyi Jiang, Taojun Ding, Tingyang Xiao, Zhizhong Su, Jie Wang, Sanping Zhou
arXiv AI
Aug 28

STEP: State-Aware Task Estimation and Planning with Multi-Modal LLMs for Human-Robot Collaboration

The paper introduces STEP, a State‑Aware Task Estimator and Planner that uses multi‑modal large language models to explicitly estimate system states and predict state transitions during task planning. By forecasting future states alongside actions, STEP reduces hallucinated actions and improves task‑convergent planning. In a simulated robot assembly task, STEP outperforms the state‑of‑the‑art by 32.8% in action executability and 14.8% in final‑state error.

By Maitrey Gramopadhye, Prakash Baskaran, Xiao Liu, Songpo Li, Soshi Iba
arXiv AI
Sep 24

BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.27450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models handle long-horizon manipulation, yet success hinges on a few precision-critical phases where millimeter-scale er...

By Weihui Zhao, Xiaohan Yan, Zunian Wan, Xuan Du, Zhaozhan Chi, Jianbo Mao, Ruipu Wu, Rushuai Yang, Houlin Li, Shukai Yang, Jing Wu, Yuxiang Yan, Yongcheng Liu, Chuankang Li, Guanghui Ren, Wei Shan, Maoqing Yao
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning

arXiv:2608.24885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on a...

By Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu, Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Siyuan Qian, Hao Chen, Jiajun Cao, Jian Tang, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control

AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.

By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence

The paper surveys 160 benchmarks from 2017‑2026 that evaluate predictive embodied intelligence, categorising them into policy suites, embodied agents, world‑model evaluation, and prediction‑to‑action bridges. It finds that most benchmarks are model‑agnostic, rarely compare Vision‑Language‑Action policies to world models, and seldom turn predictions into executed actions. The authors argue that the lack of benchmarks designed to directly test the closed‑loop advantage of world models prevents the field from answering whether such models truly improve robotic performance.

By Gaytri Jena, Kapil Wanaskar, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Vasu Sharma, Amitava Das
arXiv AI
Jul 7

HALO-WA: Hybrid-Attention Latent-Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for World-Action Models

arXiv:2607. 04265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion.

By Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang