cs.ROOct 3, 2026

DreamFormer: Dream Imitation with a Transformer World Model for Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Mostafa Kotb, Cornelius Weber, Muhammad Burhan Hafez, Stefan Wermter

Organizations: Knowledge Technology Group, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany · Mathematics Department, Faculty of Science, Aswan University, 81528 Aswan, Egypt · School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

Abstract

We introduce DreamFormer, a model-based agent that acquires language-conditioned, multi-task skills by imitating expert demonstrations within the latent imagination of a learned world model. DreamFormer first learns a task-agnostic Transformer world model from unstructured play data, then acquires task-specific behaviors by optimizing an intrinsic reward that aligns agent-generated rollouts with expert demonstrations in latent space. Since the policy is trained on-policy inside imagination, it is exposed to its own errors during training, mitigating the covariate shift inherent to offline behavioral cloning. To make long-horizon imagination affordable, DreamFormer encodes a high-resolution multi-view robotic observation into a single input token, avoiding both spatial downsampling and the multi-token representations used by prior Transformer world models. On the long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, DreamFormer outperforms LUMOS, the comparable model-based agent, on single-environment evaluation (2.52 vs 2.34 average tasks completed per chain of five) while keeping imagination rollouts tractable. Against HULC, the behavior cloning baseline, it nearly doubles performance on zero-shot transfer to an unseen environment (1.30 vs 0.67), indicating that dynamics learned by the world model transfer more readily than a directly cloned policy. This is consistent with the role attributed to internal models in biological agents, where a model of environment dynamics supports behavior in situations not previously encountered.

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