Learning Transferable World-Action Models from Task-Paired Human Videos
Organizations: NAVER AI Lab · Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
World-action models inherit broad visual and physical priors from video pre-training. However, standard within-video next-frame prediction allows them to rely on appearance shared between the context and future, rather than learning interactions that transfer across scenes and embodiments. We introduce WATCH, a cross-video pre-training that learns from task-paired human demonstrations collected across diverse environments. Conditioned on the video and actions of one demonstration, the model jointly predicts another demonstration's actions and future frames from its current observation. Predicting one demonstration from another encourages the model to learn task-relevant interactions that transfer across scenes and demonstrators. Our pre-training shows that these capabilities can be learned from readily scalable human-human pairs alone, without requiring matched human-robot demonstrations. Analyses before robot post-training show improved motion alignment across embodiments and better action and video prediction on unseen robots, with representations closer to those learned from robot pairs. After robot post-training, WATCH improves MimicDroid in-context success from 40.9% to 68.3% with Cosmos Policy and from 59.8% to 77.7% with Cosmos3, with the largest gains on the unseen levels. Gains persist under context-free post-training across robot embodiments. WATCH outperforms within-video pre-training and co-training baselines, supporting cross-video prediction as a scalable approach to learning transferable world-action representations.
Figures & tables
| Action | Generated video | |||
| MSE | acc@ | FVD | FID | |
| Original model | – | – | 290.7 | 12.48 |
| Within-video | 0.046 | 55.6 | 1485.1 | 53.53 |
| WATCH (Ours) | 0.039 | 68.5 | 154.9 | 8.33 |
| Method | L1 | L2 | L3 | Avg. |
| ICL baselines | ||||
| Vid2Robot [ 9 ] | 90.8 | 51.0 | 0.8 | 47.6 |
| HAND † [ 21 ] | 29.0 | 21.0 | 1.0 | 17.0 |
| MimicDroid † [ 10 ] | 59.0 | 44.0 | 26.0 | 43.0 |
| VLA baselines | ||||
| [ 22 ] | 79.2 | 38.3 | 8.3 | 41.9 |
| Method | MimicDroid | TableTop-Sim | RoboCasa | ||||
| Easy | Hard | Avg. | Easy | Hard | Avg. | Kitchen-H50 | |
| VLA baselines | |||||||
| [ 22 ] | 78.3 | 29.8 | 54.1 | 70.4 | 34.0 | 52.2 | 54.5 |
| GR00T-N1.7 [ 23 ] | 79.2 | 45.8 | 62.5 | 66.8 | 50.8 | 58.8 | 46.4 |
| MolmoAct2 [ 29 ] | 76.7 | 28.3 | 52.5 | 66.4 | 39.6 | 53.0 | 54.3 |
| World-action models | |||||||
| Pre-training | In-context | Context-free | |||||||||||||
| MimicDroid | MimicDroid, | MimicDroid | TableTop-Sim | Robo- Casa | |||||||||||
| L1 | L2 | L3 | Avg. | L1 | L2 | L3 | Avg. | Easy | Hard | Avg. | Easy | Hard | Avg. | ||
| None [ 3 ] | 75.0 | 29.4 | 18.3 | 40.9 | 73.3 | 18.8 | 0.0 | 30.7 | 71.7 | 26.9 | 49.3 | 69.6 | 49.6 | 59.6 | 56.0 |
| Within-video [ 13 , 16 ] | 85.8 | 44.4 | 23.3 | 51.2 | 75.0 | 7.5 | 8.3 | 30.3 | 88.3 | 40.8 | 64.6 | 71.6 | 51.6 | 61.6 | 58.3 |
| Co-training [ 15 , 7 ] | 87.5 | 58.3 | 34.2 | 60.0 | 88.3 | 25.2 | 5.0 | 39.5 | 90.0 | 42.3 | 66.1 | 69.2 | 52.8 | 61.0 | 61.7 |
| Same-source top-1 | 84.2 | 58.3 | 33.3 | 58.6 | 85.8 | 26.7 | 23.3 | 45.3 | 90.0 | 36.7 | 63.3 | 69.6 | 51.2 | 60.4 | 56.8 |
Appendix figures & tables22 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Retrieved | Same-class null | Random null | |
| speed-profile correlation | 0.23 | ||
| trajectory-shape cosine | 0.36 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| path-length ratio | 0.69 | 0.93 | 0.92 |
| speed off by more than | 22.9% | 28.7% | 39.4% |
| Action (end effector) | Generated video | |||||
| Held-out set | Model | MSE | acc@ | FVD | FID | LPIPS |
| Humanoid Everyday | Original model | – | – | 325.7 | 31.81 | 0.422 |
| Within-video | 0.077 | 51.5 | 610.4 | 31.22 | 0.366 | |
| Co-training | 0.045 | 66.2 | 105.1 | 12.70 | 0.267 | |
| WATCH (Ours) | 0.023 | 71.4 | 137.6 | 10.01 | 0.215 | |
| EgoDex | Original model | – | – | 200.5 | 8.18 | 0.243 |
| Method | L1 | L2 | L3 | |||||||||||||
| CLD | Faucet | S2Cab | S2Plate | Avg. | CLD | CRD | S2Cab | S2Plate | Avg. | CLD | Faucet | S2MW | S2Plate | Avg. | Avg. | |
| ICL baselines | ||||||||||||||||
| Vid2Robot [ 9 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 63.3 | 100.0 | 90.8 | 53.3 | 0.0 | 63.3 | 87.5 | 51.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 3.3 | 0.8 | 47.6 |
| VLA baselines | ||||||||||||||||
| [ 22 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 80.0 | 36.7 | 79.2 | 43.3 | 0.0 | 70.0 | 40.0 | 38.3 | 33.3 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 8.3 | 41.9 |
| GR00T-N1.7 [ 23 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 33.3 | 80.0 | 78.3 | 100.0 | 0.0 | 66.7 | 70.0 | 59.2 | 33.3 | 6.7 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 10.0 | 49.2 |
| Method | L1 | L2 | |||||||||
| CLD | Faucet | S2Cab | S2Plate | Avg. | CLD | CRD | S2Cab | S2Plate | Avg. | Avg. | |
| VLA baselines | |||||||||||
| [ 22 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 73.3 | 40.0 | 78.3 | 10.0 | 0.0 | 56.7 | 52.5 | 29.8 | 54.1 |
| GR00T-N1.7 [ 23 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 43.3 | 73.3 | 79.2 | 76.7 | 0.0 | 56.7 | 50.0 | 45.8 | 62.5 |
| MolmoAct2 [ 29 ] | 100.0 | 100.0 | 26.7 | 80.0 | 76.7 | 70.0 | 0.0 | 3.3 | 40.0 | 28.3 | 52.5 |
| Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B | |||||||||||
| Method | Easy (seen) | Hard (unseen) | |||||||||||
| handover box | lift box | shoes table | dish drainer | box into pot | Avg. | handover box | lift box | shoes table | dish drainer | box into pot | Avg. | Avg. | |
| VLA baselines | |||||||||||||
| [ 22 ] | 66.0 | 42.0 | 80.0 | 90.0 | 74.0 | 70.4 | 48.0 | 0.0 | 44.0 | 56.0 | 22.0 | 34.0 | 52.2 |
| GR00T-N1.7 [ 23 ] | 62.0 | 30.0 | 84.0 | 84.0 | 74.0 | 66.8 | 56.0 | 14.0 | 82.0 | 76.0 | 26.0 | 50.8 | 58.8 |
| MolmoAct2 [ 29 ] ) | 70.0 | 32.0 | 70.0 | 92.0 | 68.0 | 66.4 | 20.0 | 22.0 | 42.0 | 86.0 | 28.0 | 39.6 | 53.0 |
| Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B | |||||||||||||
World Model Learning
World model learning builds predictive models of how environments change under actions to support planning, simulation, and decision-making.
See all 418 papers