Overview

World Action Models (WAMs) learn policies alongside predictions of future observations or task-relevant states, aiming to make control account for physical consequences. Approaches range from joint video-and-action diffusion and inverse-dynamics models to compact latent, geometric, object-centric, tactile, and motion representations, trained with robot demonstrations, human video, or synthetic data. On manipulation benchmarks such as LIBERO and RoboTwin and driving tests such as NAVSIM, many methods use future prediction as training supervision or compact guidance instead of generating full video at every step. A central challenge is ensuring imagined futures are causally aligned with actions and useful under distribution shifts, while keeping inference fast and light enough for closed-loop deployment.

Latest papers

CardsList

223 papers73 papers in the last four weeks, up 115% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. When to Trust Imagination: Adaptive Action Execution for World Action Models

    May 7, 2026Rui Wang, Yue Zhang, Canyang Chen +3Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationWorld Models for Robotics

  2. Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control

    Apr 30, 2026Motubrain Team, Chendong Xiang, Fan Bao +17Robotic ControlWorld Models for Robotics

  3. AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps

    Apr 13, 2026Liaoyuan Fan, Zetian Xu, Chen Cao +3World Action ModelsRobotic Manipulation

  4. VAG: Dual-Stream Video-Action Generation for Embodied Data Synthesis

    Apr 10, 2026Xiaolei Lang, Yang Wang, Yukun Zhou +10Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsWorld Action Models

  5. Action Images: End-to-End Policy Learning via Multiview Video Generation

    Apr 7, 2026Haoyu Zhen, Zixian Gao, Qiao Sun +7Action Representation LearningWorld Action Models

  6. JailWAM: Jailbreaking World Action Models in Robot Control

    Apr 7, 2026Hanqing Liu, Songping Wang, Jiahuan Long +9Jailbreak AttacksRobot Safety

  7. Enhancing Policy Learning with World-Action Model

    Mar 30, 2026Yuci Han, Alper YilmazRobot Policy LearningWorld Action Models

  8. Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study

    Mar 23, 2026Zhanguang Zhang, Zhiyuan Li, Behnam Rahmati +11World Action ModelsRobustness of VLA Models

  9. Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?

    Mar 17, 2026Tianyuan Yuan, Zibin Dong, Yicheng Liu +1World Action ModelsEfficient Inference for World Action Models

  10. World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies

    Feb 17, 2026Seonghyeon Ye, Yunhao Ge, Kaiyuan Zheng +33World Action ModelsZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation