Organizations: Sun Yat-sen University · University of Macau · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Meituan · South China University of Technology
Evaluating robot manipulation policies through repeated physical trials is costly. We study whether an action-conditioned world model can serve as a closed-loop test environment whose policy success rates track those on real robots. Beyond realistic video, the model must return the camera views and proprioceptive state needed for the policy's next action and preserve failed-action outcomes to avoid overestimating policy capability. We introduce ProWorld, a world model that jointly predicts multi-view video and robot state, then feeds both back to a frozen policy for repeated interaction. ProWorld comprises a shared transformer for joint video-state flow prediction and Shared-Time View Encoding to distinguish cameras while preserving temporal synchronization. To reduce interaction hallucinations that turn missed grasps into successful lifts, we augment training with failed interactions collected in high-fidelity simulation, reducing inflated success rates in the generated environment. ProWorld achieves the highest overall TriWorldBench score among the compared methods. Across three policies and four local manipulation tasks, it attains a Pearson correlation of 0.95 and a Spearman correlation of 0.94 between generated and real success rates. These results support joint visual-proprioceptive feedback and failure-aware training as a basis for world-model-based policy evaluation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: ProWorld for closed-loop policy evaluation. Left: ProWorld returns multi-view observations and proprioceptive state to the policy after each action. Right: video-generation performance on TriWorldBench and WorldArena compared with Ctrl-World and DreamDojo.
Model
Minute-long generation
Multi-view generation
Calibration- free
FK-free
State output
Closed-loop evaluation
Multi-embodiment adaptation
IRASim
×
×
✓
✓
×
×
✓
Ctrl-World
×
✓
✓
×
×
✓
×
DreamDojo
✓
×
✓
✓
×
×
✓
GE-Sim 2.0
✓
✓
×
×
✓
✓
×
GigaWorld-1
✓
✓
×
×
×
✓
✓
DW0.5
×
✓
✓
✓
×
×
✓
Table 1: Capabilities of robot world models. ProWorld brings together long-horizon, multi-view generation and proprioceptive feedback without camera calibration or forward kinematics (FK).
Figure 2: ProWorld architecture and multi-view organization. Left: Metadata, independently encoded camera streams, and proprioceptive state enter a shared transformer; action chunks condition visual dynamics through AdaLN, and predicted video and state feed back to the policy. Right: Comparison of three multi-view representations. Pixel tiling combines camera images before VAE encoding, while time concatenation independently encodes each view and concatenates the resulting tokens along the temporal sequence dimension. STVE instead combines independently encoded tokens along the view dimension and uses separate time, height, width, and view rotary coordinates, preserving shared time and per-view spatial structure.
Figure 3: Training stages and attention visibility. The training recipe progresses from bidirectional video–state learning to autoregressive teacher forcing, domain adaptation, and distillation. Colored mask entries indicate allowed attention, with queries on rows and keys on columns. Autoregressive training separates clean history from current noisy targets; inference uses generated history.
Figure 4: Success and failure examples in the simulation data. Successful interactions are shown on the left and failed interactions on the right. Green and red boxes highlight the corresponding robot–object interaction regions.
Figure 5: ProWorld training data and closed-loop evaluation. (a) Samples from our large-scale multi-embodiment training data. (b) After closed-loop rollout, ProWorld preserves cross-view geometry and reconstructs a consistent scene; Ctrl-World’s reconstruction shows a blurred, deformed block. (c) Real-robot evaluation setups and tasks. (d) Generated success rates track physical outcomes on RoboChallenge.
Score
Tri-view
Task
Physical/3D
Motion
Temporal
Visual
Model
TWB
Norm. PSNR
VLM consist.
Instr. following
Interaction quality
Perspective
State alignment
Trajectory accuracy
Subject consist.
Image quality
DreamDojo
51.72
59.78
79.53
49.72
28.28
59.39
60.76
16.61
77.37
24.45
Motus
42.35
60.13
72.82
52.28
25.00
44.20
59.31
13.77
77.37
16.08
Genie Envisioner
40.73
58.74
68.15
20.20
20.10
87.91
59.28
0.84
91.40
19.36
Ctrl-World
38.98
46.39
64.20
38.90
24.19
45.15
60.47
6.09
77.05
18.37
ProWorld
53.68
62.55
84.07
62.32
28.24
74.82
62.01
30.39
83.86
26.99
Table 2: Action-conditioned three-view prediction on TriWorldBench. VLM consistency averages the three benchmark VLM scores. Higher is better.
Figure 6: Policy success in the real and generated worlds. Colors identify four tasks; shapes identify three policies. Lines are linear fits in percentage units; panels report Pearson r and Spearman ρ . Failure-data training improves outcome agreement.
Figure 7: Closed-loop visual comparison after roughly 20 seconds. Ctrl-World, Cosmos 3 Nano, and ProWorld with and without failure data start from matched observations. Boxes highlight disappearing objects, misplaced grasps, and improved contact consistency with the full model.
Visual
Consistency
Physics
3D
Control
Model
Image quality
JEPA similarity
Subject consist.
Photo. consist.
Interaction quality
Trajectory accuracy
Depth accuracy
Perspective
Instr. following
Semantic alignment
Ctrl-World
42.44
92.77
83.56
12.88
62.62
48.20
93.25
83.66
67.68
88.68
GigaWorld-1
51.18
96.77
80.97
28.11
75.10
54.27
98.44
95.60
82.14
89.42
ABot-PhysWorld
61.03
90.36
80.56
20.52
81.96
31.50
71.99
98.94
92.10
89.58
GE-Sim 2.0
46.73
97.16
82.50
7.05
73.60
58.63
96.49
93.64
82.70
89.05
Xiaomi-Robotics-U0
53.94
90.60
79.05
2.13
87.30
41.89
85.25
98.84
93.86
89.35
Table 3: Single-view prediction on WorldArena Track 1. Higher is better; bold and underline mark the best and second-best results.
Figure 8: Generated three-view successes and failures. Rows: successful and missed banana pickups, then an incomplete cloth fold. Right: ProWorld continuations after the actions at left.
Video quality
State quality
Control
Targets
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
VSC ↓
Dir. ↑
Grip. ↑
Absolute state
Video
21.21
0.798
0.1342
—
—
—
Velocity
Video
22.18
0.819
0.1167
—
—
—
Absolute state
Video + state
21.45
0.806
0.1130
20.5
0.380
0.976
Velocity
Video + state (full attn.)
22.47
0.821
0.1053
20.3
0.408
0.974
Velocity
Video + state (ours)
22.60
0.829
0.1069
14.2
0.464
0.974
Table 4: Control, prediction target, and attention ablation on AgiBotWorld-Alpha.
Table 6: Action conditioning and state supervision. Direct AdaLN improves visual prediction over token-based conditioning.
Figure 9: Ablation of the state-loss weight. The horizontal-axis label λ denotes λs in the main text. Higher PSNR (dB), SSIM, motion-direction cosine similarity (Dir.), and gripper accuracy (Grip.) are better; lower LPIPS and video–state consistency error (VSC, mm) are better. State-related metrics are shown only for nonzero weights. The default setting is λs=2 .
Variant
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
VSC ↓
Dir. ↑
Grip. ↑
Default
19.88
0.757
0.1536
9.71
0.443
0.996
Initial multi-view descriptions
19.73
0.756
0.1553
7.93
0.437
0.996
Shared flow shift 5
20.02
0.758
0.1523
8.24
0.425
0.996
Shared flow shift 12
20.31
0.762
0.1472
8.64
0.407
0.995
Appendix
Table 7: Visual context and training flow shift. Video and state use the same shift. VSC is measured in mm.
Variant
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
VSC ↓
Dir. ↑
Grip. ↑
12/12, shared schedule
20.54
0.765
0.1438
8.38
0.422
0.996
12/5, aligned progress
20.51
0.764
0.1445
7.83
0.440
0.995
12/5, independent progress
20.38
0.763
0.1458
8.91
0.430
0.995
Appendix
Table 8: Video and state noise schedules. Shift pairs denote video/state shifts; aligned progress shares a sampled denoising index across the two schedules.
Variant / output
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
VSC ↓
Dir. ↑
Grip. ↑
480p training / 480p
16.09
0.723
0.2598
16.11
0.247
0.994
Mixed training / 480p
18.20
0.757
0.2036
10.82
0.403
0.995
288p training / 288p
19.88
0.757
0.1536
9.71
0.443
0.996
Mixed training / 288p
18.14
0.723
0.1906
13.59
0.397
0.996
Appendix
Table 9: Mixed-resolution training. Results are grouped by output resolution; the mixed model is evaluated at both resolutions.
Visual quality
Content consistency
Model
IQ
Aes
JEPA
Subj
Bg
Photo
Ctrl-World
42.44
37.05
92.77
83.56
90.30
12.88
GigaWorld-1
51.18
41.17
96.77
80.97
86.43
28.11
ABot-PhysWorld
61.03
41.83
90.36
80.56
89.02
20.52
GE-Sim 2.0
46.73
39.07
97.16
82.50
90.80
7.05
Xiaomi-Robotics-U0
53.94
40.79
90.60
79.05
86.44
2.13
Appendix
Table 10: WorldArena Track 1 results on the retained metrics.
Score
Tri-view consistency
Task alignment
Model
TWB
N-PSNR
SSIM
VLM-I
VLM-II
VLM-III
VQA
Instr
Sem
JEPA
DreamDojo
51.72
59.78
71.58
77.14
73.26
88.19
47.82
49.72
88.28
30.73
Motus
42.35
60.13
76.31
63.68
67.56
87.22
45.33
52.28
86.54
10.24
Genie Envisioner
40.73
58.74
74.44
69.40
57.13
77.93
36.72
20.20
79.30
0.02
Ctrl-World
38.98
46.39
64.62
46.44
63.69
82.46
40.90
38.90
81.94
10.32
ProWorld
53.68
62.55
79.06
78.15
80.73
93.32
54.05
62.32
88.75
42.08
Appendix
Table 11: TriWorldBench results: TWB-Score and all 19 submetrics.
Figure 10: Cross-view recovery. Ground-truth frames (left) and target views recovered using the other two camera views (right).
Robot policy evaluation informs deployment decisions and policy improvement, but physical testing and simulator preparation require substantial effort. World models offer a complementary route through closed-loop interaction in generated environments. Recent benchmarks have demonstrated their potential as policy evaluators through outcome-based evaluation (i.e., assessing task success or failure). However, such evaluation does not establish whether world models faithfully simulate how policies fail. Misrepresenting failures can lead to incorrect diagnoses of policy weaknesses and make policies appear ready for deployment even when small scene changes cause them to fail. We therefore ask: do world models faithfully simulate how and at which stages policies fail, and under what conditions they transition from success to failure? To answer this question, we introduce WorldFailBench with three evaluation tasks. Failure reason tests whether models reproduce the observable errors policies make. Failure stage assesses whether failures concentrate at the same stages of full-task execution. Failure boundary examines whether models reproduce the conditions under which policies transition from success to failure under controlled scene changes in simulation. The benchmark covers manipulation tasks in the LIBERO and RoboTwin simulation environments and real-world manipulation tasks performed by the G1 humanoid robot. Experiments across seven world models reveal substantial gaps in their understanding of policy failures, providing guidance for developing more reliable world models for policy evaluation.
Video world models are emerging as a scalable alternative for evaluating generalist robot policies, bypassing the physical constraints and engineering burdens of real-world deployment. However, evaluating policies with video world models remains challenging, as world-model errors can make generated rollouts unreliable and slow inference limits large-scale throughput. We introduce RoboWorld, an automated evaluation pipeline that pairs a fast autoregressive video world model with a task-progress-aware vision-language model scoring. To enable reliable long-horizon autoregressive world-model rollouts, we propose Step Forcing, which combines anchored and one-step self-forwarded contexts to reduce train-test mismatch while preserving action-observation dynamics. Together, these components enable RoboWorld to align strongly with real-world robot evaluation across tasks and environments, achieving Pearson's r = 0.989 and Spearman's ρ = 0.970.
Evaluating and post-training robot policies through physical interaction is costly and difficult to scale, motivating action-conditioned world models as interactive simulators. However, visually plausible predictions can misrepresent contact dynamics, providing unreliable feedback for policy evaluation and learning. We introduce PhysCanvas, a state-consistent visuo-tactile world model for contact-rich robot manipulation. PhysCanvas unifies multi-view RGB, tactile images, marker displacement, task state, and actions within a unified vision space. All modalities share a video VAE and pretrained generative backbone, allowing optical touch to reuse visual and temporal priors. Motion images derived through forward kinematics and camera projection provide spatially aligned action conditioning, while an initial RGB anchor and updated reference observations guide sequential generation. Our consistency-aware post-training uses the frozen Scene Reward Model, Modality Reward Model, and State Reward Model to supervise scene preservation, visual-tactile compatibility, and agreement with real task outcomes. The resulting world model supports closed-loop policy rollouts for evaluation and provides imagined interactions and rewards for GRPO policy updates. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, when policies are rolled out in the world model, State Reward Model supervision increases the arithmetic mean of task-wise Pearson correlations between world-model and real-world success rates from 0.602 to 0.885. Policy post-training in the reward-guided world model further increases π0.5's mean real-world success rate from a 59.1% SFT baseline to 70.8%. These results demonstrate the value of unified multimodal modeling and consistency-aware post-training for robot policy evaluation and learning. Project page: https://zebinx.github.io/PhysCanvas_HomePage/.
Zebin Xing, Yuhang Zheng, Yupeng Zheng +8
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Anyverse Robotics · Open-Phoenix Team +3