Predicted Futures Are Not Enough: Learning Executable Goals for Robot Manipulation

World-action models can jointly predict future visual observations and robot actions. However, discrepancies may exist between their visual predictions and the consequences implied by generated actions. We observe that WAMs can often generate visually plausible task-completion outcomes before producing action sequences that reliably achieve them. Consequently, we treat the WAM-generated visual prediction as a goal-conditioned visual proposal rather than a directly executable plan. We use a frozen action-conditioned world model to predict action-conditioned consequences and construct feedback based on consistency between the two future predictions and alignment with the terminal goal. Leveraging this feedback, we employ Flow Policy Optimization (FPO) to optimize the action head of the WAM. This framework avoids online robot interaction and additional training of task-specific reward models. Across four real-world UR5 manipulation tasks, our method increases the mean success rate from 43.4% to 75.1%, compared with 61.4% for $π_{0.5}$. These results show that cross-model prediction discrepancy can provide useful feedback for improving robot policies under the evaluated manipulation tasks. Website: https://imagine-to-achieve.github.io/

We present \textbf{DreamX-Phi 1.0}, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and a prescribed action sequence comprising end-effector poses and gripper states, predicts the resulting future observations. Yet realism alone does not guarantee faithfulness: a convincing rollout can still move the wrong arm or lose the manipulated object. To ensure the prediction respects each arm's commanded path, we inject per-arm $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ transformations into attention via \textbf{PRoPE-style geometric encoding}, preserving arm identity and rigid-motion structure. Action control alone does not fully constrain scene geometry or the evolution of small manipulated objects. We therefore add a lightweight \textbf{depth branch} for scene-level geometry and use \textbf{SAM3 masks} with a frozen \textbf{V-JEPA teacher} to maintain object consistency throughout grasping. We further distill the multi-step generator into a few-step student via distribution-matching distillation for efficient deployment. At the time of writing, \model{} achieves first place on Track1 and second place on Track2 of the WorldArena~2.0 Challenge. Our model and code will be publicly available.

Robotic manipulation depends on the ability to anticipate how actions reshape objects, contacts, and scene geometry before execution. Learned world models provide this capability by predicting task-relevant future evolution under robot intervention, yet the term now spans latent dynamics models, action-conditioned video generators, three- and four-dimensional scene predictors, physics-informed simulators, and predictive modules inside vision-language-action systems. This breadth has fragmented the literature and obscured the design choices that matter for manipulation. We survey world models for robotic manipulation through three questions: what future representation is predicted, how prediction is connected to action, and when prediction is used in the robot-learning pipeline. We operationally define a world model as an action-conditioned predictive system and distinguish it from perception modules, inverse models, policies, rewards, and value functions. We then organize existing work into five representation families, develop a functional taxonomy that separates integrated prediction-action models from explicit predictive planners, and characterize infrastructure roles including synthetic experience generation, candidate filtering, search-based evaluation, learned environments, and outcome verification. We further map these roles across pretraining, post-training, and inference adaptation, review 34 manipulation datasets, and synthesize evaluation protocols for predictive fidelity, task performance, and simulator reliability. This survey shows that world models are evolving from task-specific dynamics predictors into predictive infrastructure for robot learning, while exposing open challenges in contact modeling, hallucination control, action alignment, and benchmarking under closed-loop use.