AcrossWAM1.0:A Modular Latent World-Action Stack for Compact Robot Policies
Authors: Yafei Zhang, Nan Wu
Organizations: Across Physical AI, Beijing, China
Abstract
Latent world-action models avoid rendering future pixels by predicting an action-relevant visual subgoal in feature space. LaWAM established this formulation, but its original presentation left the world model, multimodal backbone, and deployment checkpoint tightly coupled. We introduce AcrossWAM1.0, a modularization and scaling study of this latent world-action stack. Rather than presenting latent subgoals as a new algorithm, we make the module boundary explicit: a policy adapter produces latent-action and action-generation contexts; a retained latent world decoder grounds the predicted transition in the current scene;and a flow-matching expert generates continuous action chunks. We further separate training-only teachers from the inference graph and provide a verifiable deployment export. On 2,000 paired LIBERO episodes, replacing a Qwen3-VL-2B backbone with Qwen3.5-0.8B yields 97.45% success versus 98.00% for the 2B model (a-0.55percentage-point difference; exact McNemarp=0.266). This does not prove equivalence, but it meets a prespecified two-point retention criterion. The compact, inference-reachable checkpoint contains 1,472.6M unique parameters, 42.4% fewer than the original 2B policy, while all retained tensors are bitwise identical to the source checkpoint. Cross-family execution is additionally checked with a MiniCPM-V adapter smoke test; closed-loop cross-family transfer remains an open evaluation. AcrossWAM1.0 therefore contributes an auditable software and evaluation boundary for compact latent world-action policies, distinct from LaWAM's original latent-subgoal contribution.
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.
World Action Models (WAMs) extend robot policy learning by incorporating future prediction as an additional training objective, encouraging the policy to encode task-relevant temporal structure in its representations. Current WAMs often rely on large-scale generative architectures that incur high training costs and inference latency, making them difficult to deploy as efficient closed-loop policies. We propose Light-WAM, a lightweight World Action Model for efficient robot manipulation. Specifically, it is built with a compact video backbone and performs future-video supervision in a downsampled latent space, reducing the cost of video co-training while retaining its benefits for representation learning. For action prediction, Light-WAM introduces the StateFusionActionExpert, which reads adapted states from multiple backbone layers, fuses them through learned-query pooling, and directly predicts action chunks in a single forward pass. This design provides an efficient interface between video backbone representations and robot actions, avoiding the need for heavy generative action experts. Experiments demonstrate that Light-WAM maintains strong performance on LIBERO and achieves usable multi-task performance on RoboTwin 2.0, while using only 0.44B trainable parameters. It also achieves 72.03ms inference latency with 4.1GiB peak GPU memory and improved training throughput.
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. However, existing WAMs often incur substantial computational overhead. Pixel-space methods often allocate substantial capacity to visual details that may not be directly relevant to control, while some latent-space methods require multi-stage training to construct the reasoning space. The resulting training cost can make such methods difficult to train under modest computational budgets. In this work, we propose LiLa-WAM, a lightweight world-action model that reasons about the future in a compact latent space and can be trained end-to-end on a single 24GB GPU. Its core design is a compact latent reasoning space jointly shaped by future-state prediction and action generation, which keeps the model lightweight while remaining well aligned with control. For task specification, we further propose the Visual Transition Token(VTT), a language-free task representation that encodes each task as a direction in visual feature space. Experiments on RoboTwin~2.0, LIBERO, and real-robot tasks demonstrate LiLa-WAM's effectiveness, achieving 90.48% success across 50 RoboTwin tasks with single-GPU training.