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:2512. 19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging the gap between natural language commands and autonomous execution in unstructured environments remains an open challenge for robotics.
By Jin Wang, Kim Tien Ly, Jacques Cloete, Jin Jin, Nikos Tsagarakis, Ioannis Havoutis
arXiv:2608. 03701v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action modeling has emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control, as it empowers models to go beyond reacting to observations and anticipate how a scene will evolve.
By Fan Yang, Yuting Su, Xiaobo Wang, Yuncheng You, Fugui Fan, Yuting Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, JiaHong Ning, Peiguang Jing
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
Zero-WAM introduces a causal video-action model that enables robots to perform unseen manipulation tasks by following in-context human video guidance. The authors create HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks, and propose an in-context future chunk prediction objective to prevent shortcut learning. In simulation, Zero-WAM attains a 47.0% success rate on seven unseen tasks, outperforming the best video-action baseline by 29.5 percentage points, and demonstrates real‑world generalization to complex, long‑horizon, and fine‑grained tasks.
By Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
arXiv:2606. 13053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained-feature world models provide a useful substrate for robot imagination, but visual or latent prediction alone does not determine whether an imagined future satisfies task-relevant events.
By Kailin Wang, Haoxiang Jie, Yaoyuan Yan, Jiacheng Zhou, Zhiyou Heng