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. 29908v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing world model-based planners for visual navigation typically follow a verification-centric paradigm, decoupling goal intent from trajectory synthesis.
By Hong Chen, Daqi Liu, Zehan Zhang, Haiguang Wang, Tianhao Lu, Longfei Yan, Haiyang Sun, Fangzhen Li, Hongwei Xie, Bing Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Yihua Tan
AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.
By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
arXiv:2606. 29879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide powerful semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) planning.
By Chen Yang, Yuhao Wei, Ze Xu, Ziheng Zou, Shuang Liang, Delin Ouyang, Lingfeng Qi, Jie Li, Guofa Li
arXiv:2607.10744v5 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Benefiting from the powerful priors embedded in large-scale pre-training data and the emerging commonsense reasoning ability, large language models...
By Changfei Fu, Guangcheng Chen, Aoxiang Gu, Haoxiang Liang, Wenjun Xu, Hong Zhang
arXiv:2603.18532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The strong performance of large vision-language models (VLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) has motivated similar approaches for f...
By Andrew Choi, Xinjie Wang, Zhizhong Su, Wei Xu