Organizations: MMLab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong · The University of Hong Kong · X-Humanoid Robots · Tsinghua University
World-model-based imagine-then-act becomes a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, yet existing approaches typically support either purely image-based forecasting or reasoning over partial 3D geometry, limiting their ability to predict complete 4D scene dynamics. This work proposes a novel embodied 4D world model that enables geometrically consistent, arbitrary-view RGBD generation: given only a single-view RGBD observation as input, the model imagines the remaining viewpoints, which can then be back-projected and fused to assemble a more complete 3D structure across time. To efficiently learn the multi-view, cross-modality generation, we explicitly design cross-view and cross-modality feature fusion that jointly encourage consistency between RGB and depth and enforce geometric alignment across views. Beyond prediction, converting generated futures into actions is often handled by inverse dynamics, which is ill-posed because multiple actions can explain the same transition. We address this with a test-time action optimization strategy that backpropagates through the generative model to infer a trajectory-level latent best matching the predicted future, and a residual inverse dynamics model that turns this trajectory prior into accurate executable actions. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate strong performance on both 4D scene generation and downstream manipulation, and ablations provide practical insights into the key design choices.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The overview of our main pipeline.
Figure 2: Qualitative Results of 4D Generation on RoboTwin dataset. Red, green, and blue boxes represent different viewpoints.
Figure 3: Generated Geometries on Real-World Robot dataset
Figure 4: Effect of geometry-aware cross view modeling
Appearance
Depth
Point Cloud
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
FVD ↓
AbRel ↓
RMSE ↓
δ1↑
CD ↓
EMD ↓
RLBench
UniPi*
23.88
91.7
19.94
117.9
43.2
91.6
15.0
20.6
4DGen
22.25
87.1
20.51
91.8
29.3
94.1
10.9
16.0
TesserAct
23.86
92.8
27.77
91.8
29.4
96.8
11.0
16.3
Ours
23.31
90.8
18.57
90.5
29.1
97.1
9.6
15.3
Table 1: 4D generation results on the RLBench, RoboTwin, and our real-world datasets. The SSIM, AbRel, RMSE, CD, and EMD are scaled by 102
Appearance
Depth
Point Cloud
Method
PSNR↑
SSIM↑
FVD↓
AbRel↓
RMSE↓
δ1 ↑
CD↓
EMD↓
w/o view
21.47
88.3
24.85
3.34
14.30
95.7
8.34
17.50
EA
22.43
89.2
23.36
3.03
12.70
96.9
7.33
12.50
w/o mod
20.16
83.8
25.25
4.03
16.77
95.2
7.51
16.80
Ours
22.91
90.2
21.93
2.60
12.30
97.4
6.51
9.90
Table 2: Ablation studies on cross- view and modality modules
Figure 5: Effect of explicit cross-modality modeling
Baselines
Ablations
Dataset
P-ACT
UniPi *
4DGen
TesserAct
Act Head
full IDM
w/o R-IDM
full model
RLBench
60.4
34.6
47.0
67.3
72.5
68.8
69.0
72.6
RoboTwin
20.5
16.3
40.2
33.9
42.5
41.7
42.8
43.0
Table 3: Manipulation results on RLBench and RoboTwin.
Method
Arrange Boxes
Cap Bottle
Open Drawer
Place Fruits
Put Orange
Stack Cubes
TesserAct
7
27
37
17
66
45
Ours
15
33
56
23
63
50
Table 4: Success rates for some tasks on the real robot platform.
Dataset
w/o view
w/o mod
w/o view+mod
cat depth
w/o TCN-VAE
Full
RLBench
68.8
67.2
66.5
66.1
68.1
72.6
RoboTwin
38.0
38.6
36.2
39.4
41.5
43.0
Table 5: Manipulation ablations on fusion modules and trajectory representation. All variants use the same 3-view RGB-D input.
Benchmark
4DGen
TesserAct
Ours
+ActionInit
RLBench SR
47.0%
67.3%
72.6%
76.5%
RLBench Time
51+22=73 s
37+16=53 s
42+16=58 s
42+5=47 s
RoboTwin SR
40.2%
33.9%
43.0%
46.6%
RoboTwin Time
83+25=108 s
68+23=91 s
75+23=98 s
75+9=84 s
Table 6: Efficiency comparison under the same video backbone on a single NVIDIA RTX H200. Time is reported as generation + post-processing.
Appendix figures & tables15 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 6: Simulator camera layout
Figure 7: Real robot setup
Figure 8: Illustrations of Manipulation Tasks in our real-world dataset
Appearance
Depth
Point Cloud
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
FVD ↓
AbsRel ↓
RMSE ↓
δ1↑
CD ↓
EMD ↓
4DGen
22.25
87.1
20.51
91.8
29.3
94.1
10.9
16.0
TesserAct
23.86
92.8
27.29
91.8
29.4
96.8
11.0
16.3
Ours-mode1
22.55
89.3
21.67
90.8
29.2
96.9
10.2
15.2
Ours-mode2
23.31
90.8
18.57
90.5
29.1
97.1
9.6
15.3
Appendix
Table 7: Comparisons of 4D generation about our two modes strategies for supporting various multiview generations. SSIM, AbsRel, RMSE, δ1 , CD, and EMD are scaled by 102 .
Method
Unplug Charger
Close Drawer
Close Grill
Close Microwave
Lamp On
Open Drawer
Pick Up Cup
Play Jenga
Push Button
Take Umbrella
P-ACT
6
88
96
64
8
80
12
96
72
52
UniPi*
9
62
70
45
0
68
0
78
12
2
4DGen
46
18
91
65
25
15
26
96
77
10
TesserAct
50
83
83
68
30
92
61
87
83
36
Ours
55
91
96
75
37
98
62
97
89
43
Appendix
Table 8: Detailed Comparisons of per manipulation task success rate on RLBench platform
Method
Adjust Bottle
Beat Hammer
Click Alarm clock
Click Bell
Grab Roller
Lift Pot
Move Pill bottle
Place Container
Object Stand
Phone Stand
P-ACT
56
3
37
22
26
3
0
43
15
0
UniPi*
28
15
10
5
51
18
0
26
10
0
4DGen
65
37
29
35
61
40
49
59
22
5
TesserAct
62
41
38
25
35
26
28
45
37
2
Ours
69
42
31
38
68
42
46
72
15
7
Appendix
Table 9: Detailed comparisons of per manipulation task success rate on RoboTwin platform.
Appearance
Depth
Point Cloud
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
FVD ↓
AbRel ↓
RMSE ↓
δ1↑
CD ↓
EMD ↓
RoboTwin
Flatten Cam
22.57
89.6
21.26
3.27
15.62
93.9
11.36
12.45
Ours
22.91
90.2
21.93
2.60
12.30
97.4
6.51
9.90
Real-world Dataset
Flatten Cam
22.19
89.5
21.36
21.43
25.65
80.60
17.75
16.82
Appendix
Table 10: Ablation on camera embedding. We compare our proposed camera embedding against a baseline that flattens camera extrinsics and projects them with an MLP ( Flatten Cam ). Results are reported on RoboTwin and our real-world dataset. SSIM, AbsRel, RMSE, δ1 , CD, and EMD are scaled by 102 .
Num Views
1
2
3
4
5
RLBench (%)
68.6
71.5
72.6
72.9
73.1
Time cost
0.78
0.85
1.00
1.20
1.35
Appendix
Table 11: Effect of the number of views on RLBench average success rate and time cost.
Figure 9: Failure case in the open-drawer task: our method successfully localizes the drawer handle but pulls in an incorrect direction, likely due to ambiguity in the optimal pulling direction under occlusion and limited viewpoints.
Figure 10: Failure case on RoboTwin (contact-sensitive task): the policy roughly reaches the target area but the end-effector is spatially misaligned and misses the red target block.
Figure 11: Multiview generation results by Mode-2 strategy on RoboTwin Dataset and corresponding results from 4DGen
Figure 12: Multiview generation results by Mode-1 strategy on RLBench Dataset and corresponding results from 4DGen
Figure 13: Qualitative Generation Results on RLBench Dataset.
Figure 14: Qualitative Generation Results on Real-World place cubes into cup task.
Figure 15: Qualitative Generation Results on Real-World open drawer task.
Robotic manipulation in the open world requires not only recognizing what a scene looks like, but also anticipating how its 3D structure moves under interaction. We argue that synchronized RGB, depth, and optical flow (RGB-DF) provide a physically grounded representation that captures the underlying 4D dynamics of a scene. Compared to 2D pixel videos, this multi-modal synergy aligns visual appearance with geometric structure and temporal motion, creating a representation space significantly closer to low-level end-effector actions demanded by robotic systems, narrowing the gap between world prediction and policy learning. Building on this insight, we introduce RynnWorld-4D, a generative model that co-produces future RGB frames, depth maps, and optical flow from a single RGB-D image and a language instruction within one unified diffusion process. This 4D world model features a tri-branch architecture that integrates cross-modal attention with frame-wise 3D RoPE, ensuring that appearance, geometry, and motion evolve consistently. To supply training data at scale, we curate Rynn4DDataset 1.0, a massive dataset of over 254.4 million frames across egocentric human and robotic manipulation videos with high-quality pseudo-labels for depth and optical flow. We further propose RynnWorld-4D-Policy, an inverse dynamics head that consumes the internal 4D representations of RynnWorld-4D in a single forward pass, bypassing expensive multi-step denoising, to output robot actions in a closed-loop manner. Experiments show that RynnWorld-4D produces temporally and spatially coherent 4D predictions, and that RynnWorld-4D-Policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world dexterous bimanual manipulation tasks, particularly excelling in tasks demanding spatial precision and temporal coordination.
Haoyu Zhao, Xingyue Zhao, Siteng Huang +3
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group · Hong Kong Embodied AI Lab · CUHK +1
Video world models can generate realistic futures from a single instruction, but they often fail to track the same physical points consistently across time. As a result, the generated videos appear plausible, yet lack the physical grounding required for reliable action execution, such as robot manipulation. We present GEM-4D, a geometry-grounded video world model that resolves this limitation by injecting dense 4D correspondence supervision distilled from a pretrained geometry foundation model into the video generative backbone during training. This supervision enables the model to jointly capture appearance and geometric structure while retaining a single-stream architecture with no additional inference cost. We further introduce an inverse dynamics module that converts correspondence-consistent video rollouts into executable robot trajectories, enabling direct deployment in both real-world and simulated manipulation. GEM-4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both video prediction and geometric consistency across both simulation and realistic scenarios and improves real-world manipulation success from 61% to 81%. Additional results are available at https://gem-4d.github.io/.
Kaichen Zhou, Yuzhen Chen, Fangneng Zhan +8
Harvard AI and Robotics Lab, Harvard University · Media Lab and EECS, MIT · MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab +1
Embodied agents require robust and comprehensive 3D spatiotemporal representations to support spatial reasoning, manipulation understanding, and downstream decision making. However, existing robot data are typically captured from fixed or sparse viewpoints, providing only partial and view-dependent observations, which limits multi-view perception and generalization across viewpoints. Given the difficulty of collecting additional viewpoints in real-world settings, we propose Embody4D, a dedicated video-to-video world model for embodied scenarios to bridge this observation gap by transforming a monocular robot video into novel-view videos from flexible target camera viewpoints. First, to tackle training data scarcity, we introduce a 3D-aware compositional synthesis pipeline to curate a heterogeneous dataset compositing cross-embodiment robotic arms with diverse backgrounds, promoting broad generalization. Second, to enforce geometric stability, we devise a latent confidence-aware expert modulation strategy, which estimates the reliability of warped latent priors and adaptively routes regions to copy, repair, or inpaint experts for spatiotemporally consistent 4D generation. Finally, to enhance the fidelity of the manipulation, we incorporate an interaction-aware attention mechanism that explicitly attends to the robotic interaction regions. Extensive experiments show that Embody4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual evaluation benchmarks, while both simulated and real-world robotic experiments further demonstrate its effectiveness as a robust data engine for synthesizing high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that empower downstream robotic planning and learning.
Peiyan Tu, Hanxin Zhu, Jingwen Sun +6
Zhejiang University · University of Science and Technology of China · Beijing Zhongguancun Academy +3