SimWAM is a lightweight World-Action Model that uses future‑video prediction only during training to supervise an action expert, enabling end‑to‑end autonomous driving without costly test‑time future imagination. The architecture co‑trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert via joint flow matching, while an isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames. This design allows the video backbone to be swapped and the action expert scaled independently, achieving 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art WAM planners with lower latency and zero‑shot transfer to nuScenes.
By Zongchuang Zhao, Xin Zhou, Tianyang Xu, Zhengyang Sun, Kaixuan Zhou, Yu Wu, Honglin Li, Dingkang Liang, Xiang Bai
WALT introduces a method to align latent trajectories with pretrained driving world models, creating a compact generative trajectory space that preserves action-relevant semantics without altering the original model. The approach uses a dual-branch autoencoder to map raw waypoints into this latent space and transfers visual world knowledge into trajectory representations. Experiments on NAVSIM benchmarks show modest performance gains and a 30.5% reduction in planner FLOPs, indicating that maintaining world representations while extracting action-relevant information can improve trajectory planning efficiency.
By Mingkai Jia, Jiaxin Guo, Zhijian Shu, Jiawei Xu, Mingxiao Li, Jintao Cheng, Ping Tan, Wei Yin
arXiv:2608.20974v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) learns powerful spatiotemporal representations from video through self-supervised latent featu...
By Xinlin Wang, Yujiao Xiang, Yuheng Zhou, Jingqi Wang, Minqing Huang, Jiajie Huang, Dongxu Wei, Tingguang Zhou, Xiyang Wang, Gong Chen, Zhi Xu, Feiyang Tan, Hangning Zhou, Mu Yang
arXiv:2608. 11605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) couple future visual prediction with robot action generation, enabling policies to model how the physical world evolves during interaction.
By Jiakai Huang, Zhongbo Wu, Zheng Zhang, Zihan Wang, Shan You, Tao Huang
DA‑WAM is a framework that integrates predictive representation learning, action‑conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring into a single decision‑making objective for autonomous driving. It uses an online encoder with a stable momentum target to keep future representations aligned with the driving task, generating a distinct future latent for each trajectory candidate. A future‑latent‑conditioned scorer evaluates these latents, with expert‑matched trajectories supervised by observed futures and safety‑critical hard negatives providing additional guidance, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on NAVSIM‑v1 and NAVSIM‑v2.
By Ruiguo Zhong, Benshan Ma, Xiaolong Chen, Lang Zhang, Mingyue Feng, Yaonong Wang, Pei Liu, Jun Ma
arXiv:2609.23369v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generation-free world action models (WAMs) retain future-video prediction during training but act from internal video features at inference, leaving un...
By Qiwen Gu, Jifan Li, Bingjie Gao, Rui Chen, Jing Tang, Xiangxiang Chu, Junqiao Zhao
The paper introduces the Dual-Latent World Model (Dual-WM), which separates local execution and long-range planning into distinct latent spaces and dynamics models. A new learning method, Long-Horizon Representation Learning with Weighted Rollout (LoRe), supervises predictions at both levels using exponential horizon weights. Experiments on five goal-conditioned visual control tasks show that Dual-WM improves success rates over strong baselines, especially at longer horizons.
By Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Shaobin Zhuang, Junlin He, Xiaoyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Yuxin Liu, Limin Wang, Yali Wang
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
arXiv:2608. 12854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics.
By Bing Zhan, Shuyao Shang, Jiahao Gu, Shuo Lu, Yuan Xu, Zhao Wang, Yida Wang, Xueyang Zhang, Kun Zhan, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
PlanWAM introduces a Planning‑Shaped World Action Model that tailors future‑state representations to be most useful for trajectory planning in end‑to‑end autonomous driving. It compresses historical observations with a Temporal Register Pyramid, shapes a future latent representation using a privileged posterior branch guided by planning objectives, and distills this into a prior branch that predicts the representation from history alone. The resulting foresighted planning context yields state‑of‑the‑art performance on NAVSIM and HUGSIM benchmarks.
By Jinchang Xu, Hongda Yu, Fengwei Dong, Wenhui Huang, Xi Wei, Yongzhi Liu, Sunan Zhang, Jirao Wang, Chen Lv, Bingbing Li, Guodong Yin, Weichao Zhuang
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
Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics. Existing end-to-end driving approaches, however, typically emphasize only one side of this requirement: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exploit VLM priors for semantic reasoning, while World Action Models (WAMs) provide future-aware prediction through generative world modeling.