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
The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples high‑level planning from low‑latency control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them autonomously at high frequency. Experiments across seven embodied environments, including multi‑agent settings, show that this approach outperforms both controller‑only and direct VLM action‑generation methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping in different pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning.
The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples planning and control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them at high frequency, trained via relabeling rollouts with synthetic instructions and joint optimization of behavior cloning, reward, and world‑model objectives. Across seven embodied environments—including multi‑agent settings—this approach outperforms controller‑only and direct VLM action methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning, achieving competitive results with strong baselines on most tasks.
By Zineng Tang, Kelsey R. Allen, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Ishita Dasgupta, Alane Suhr
The paper investigates Joint-Embedding Predictive World Models (JEPA-WMs), a class of methods that perform planning in a learned representation space rather than raw input space. It systematically studies how model architecture, training objectives, and planning algorithms influence success across simulated and real‑world robotic tasks, and proposes a JEPA-WM variant that surpasses established baselines in navigation and manipulation. The authors provide code, data, and checkpoints for reproducibility.
By Basile Terver, Tsung-Yen Yang, Jean Ponce, Adrien Bardes, Yann LeCun
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
Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models (RP1) is a novel method that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and to improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. It is the first approach to fully learn plan improvement and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using far fewer roll‑outs and running up to 67× faster than the strongest alternative.
By Armin Sommer, Jannik Schilling
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:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
By Ali Alrasheed, Basim Azam, Naveed Akhtar
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
By Jinrui Liu, Bingyan Nie, Boyu Li, Yaran Chen, Yuze Wang, Shunsen He, Haoran Li
arXiv:2607. 00836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models are increasingly used in embodied intelligence and generative simulation, yet their scope remains ambiguous across communities.
By Xiaoxiong Zhang, Xiong Zeng, Wei Zhang
Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models introduces RP1, a neural planner that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. Unlike existing planners that are hand‑designed or only inform policies, RP1 fully learns to refine plans and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using 1,000× fewer roll‑outs and up to 67× faster inference.
arXiv:2604. 03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning.
By Wancong Zhang, Basile Terver, Artem Zholus, Soham Chitnis, Harsh Sutaria, Mido Assran, Randall Balestriero, Amir Bar, Adrien Bardes, Yann LeCun, Nicolas Ballas