cs.ROJun 11, 2026

μ_0: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model

Authors: Seungjae LeeYoonkyo JungJusuk LeeJonghun ShinAmir Hossein ShahidzadehYao-Chih LeeH. Jin KimJia-Bin Huang+1 more

Organizations: University of Maryland, College Park · Seoul National University

Abstract

World models that capture how actions induce physical change enable scalable robot learning without reliance on embodiment-specific action labels. Pixel-space video models provide broad visual priors but expend model capacity on dense appearance reconstruction, while direct action models require embodiment-specific labels that hinder scalability. We present μ0μ_0, a scalable world model based on 3D traces. Rather than predicting dense pixels or directly modeling actions, μ0μ_0 forecasts smooth 3D trajectories for salient interaction points such as objects, tools, hands, and contact regions, yielding a compact, embodiment-agnostic motion interface. To enable training from diverse video sources, our TraceExtract system automatically extracts 3D supervision by selecting keypoints, constructing globally aligned traces, and associating motion segments with hierarchical language captions. This TraceExtract supervision pretrains μ0μ_0 by combining a pretrained vision-language backbone with a modular trace expert, which represents each query via B-spline control points and predicts future traces. Experiments show that μ0μ_0 outperforms baselines in both 2D and 3D trace prediction, including trace prediction models and tokenized VLM methods. Because μ0μ_0 is frozen and reusable, it can be paired with action experts for downstream robot embodiments. Despite action-free pretraining, the resulting trace-conditioned policies achieve performance competitive with VLA models pretrained with action supervision, such as π0π_0. These results establish 3D traces as a scalable and transferable representation for cross-embodiment manipulation.

Explore similar work

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

WLA^3: World Latent Action Modeling for Semantics, Dynamics, and Kinematics

Scaling generalist policy models with heterogeneous data is limited by the lack of unified, low-noise action supervision. Human egocentric videos are abundant, but only a small fraction comes with high-quality hand-action labels. Observed world transitions offer a common source of action-related supervision across data sources. We introduce WLA3^3 (World Latent Action Modeling for Semantics, Dynamics, and Kinematics), a unified generalist policy model framework built around representations learned by a World Latent Action Model (WLAM). WLAM first learns how multimodal world states change over a local interval, encoding synchronized camera views and available embodiment-state changes into a compact local latent action and a richer transition feature. Reconstruction from partial modalities and consistency across overlapping windows encourage robust transition representations. WLA3^3 reuses them across semantics, dynamics, and kinematics: local latent actions support action-sensitive physical-dynamics modeling, segment-level features directly supervise the VLM through a Semantic Latent Aggregate (SLA), and an action expert jointly predicts latent actions together with embodiment-specific robot controls. Human videos provide scalable transition supervision, while robot trajectories ground the shared representation in executable native controls. On LARYBench, the final 32D latent action reaches 67.89% average classification accuracy. WLA3^3 achieves 81.9% average success across six real-robot tasks versus 66.2% for π0.5π_{0.5}. Performance improves as generalist policy model mid-training data scales, and human videos support human-to-robot transfer. Project page can be found at https://wla-3.github.io/.
Peidong Liu, Zhiyuan Xiang, Mingyang Li +4
May 31, 2026cs.RO

τ_0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation requires models that generate executable actions while anticipating and evaluating their future consequences before physical execution. We present τ0τ_0-World Model (τ0τ_0-WM), a unified video-action world model that integrates policy learning, video prediction, and action evaluation within a single future-predictive framework. Built on a shared video diffusion backbone, τ0τ_0-WM provides two complementary interfaces. First, a video action model jointly predicts future visual latents and continuous action chunks from multi-view observations, language instructions, and robot state. Second, an action-conditioned video simulator rolls out candidate action chunks into multi-view futures and predicts dense task-progress scores. The model is trained on approximately 27,30027{,}300 hours of real-robot teleoperation, UMI-style interaction, egocentric human videos, and rollout or failure trajectories using modality-specific supervision masks. At inference time, τ0τ_0-WM uses test-time computation to sample action candidates, rank them with re-denoising consistency, and invoke simulator-based rectification for low-quality candidates. On challenging long-horizon and fine-grained robotic manipulation tasks, τ0τ_0-WM shows superior performance over other relevant baselines.
Pengfei Zhou, Shengcong Chen, Di Chen +17
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

IMPACT: Attention Is the Interaction Map for Scalable Interaction-Aware World Model Training

World models have made remarkable progress in action-conditioned future prediction for embodied agents, yet still struggle to model physically plausible interactions. Existing approaches address this limitation by constraining the generation process with external representations encoding motion, geometry, or semantics. Obtaining these spatiotemporally dense representations typically requires auxiliary estimators or manual annotations, limiting training scalability. We instead revisit the training objective and identify a supervision-allocation mismatch under the globally averaged mean squared error (MSE) denoising objective: prevalent static content dominates the optimization signal, leaving sparse dynamic-object regions critical to interaction generation disproportionately under-supervised. Motivated by this observation, we introduce IMPACT, a scalable Interaction-aware Model training framework with Prior-guided Attention Calibration and Targeting. IMPACT uses cross-attention associated with manipulated-object tokens as an internal spatiotemporal prior for action-conditioned changes. It samples candidate regions from this prior, calibrates them with detached local prediction errors to construct an interaction map, and uses the map to reweight denoising supervision, requiring neither external representations nor inference-time modifications. Extensive experiments on robot-arm and human-hand manipulation, spanning diverse control modalities and DiT backbones, show that IMPACT consistently outperforms the corresponding MSE-trained baselines, improving interaction fidelity, physical plausibility, and visual quality.
Rongze Tang, Jianjie Fang, Zhaolu Wang +8