cs.ROJun 2, 2026

CLAW: Learning Continuous Latent Action World Models via Adversarial Latent Regularization

Authors: Tewodros AyalewMatthew JeungSamuel WheelerXiao ZhangAndre de la Cruz ArceKaylene StockingMichael MaireMatthew R. Walter

Organizations: University of Chicago · 3Argonne National Laboratory · 2Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Abstract

We introduce CLAW, a fully end-to-end self-supervised framework for learning a world model jointly with continuous latent action representations directly from action-free videos. Our approach leverages adversarial latent regularization and diffusion-based video generation to capture structured and semantically meaningful action representations while modeling rich, predictive environment dynamics, without relying on any action labels or annotations. By simultaneously training the Latent Action Model and world model, CLAW learns to reason about how inferred actions induce environment transitions from visual observations alone. We show that the resulting latent action world model supports both imitation learning from observation and goal-directed planning. In imitation learning, latent actions extracted from raw videos enable behavior cloning. For planning, CLAW generates sequences of latent actions and maps them to executable actions to reach desired goals. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and embodiments demonstrate that CLAW produces semantically meaningful latent action representations, supports effective action transfer, and enables planning and imitation from observation, outperforming existing methods.

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