World Models

Generative visual models offer a foundation for learning representations of physical dynamics, yet their extension to continuous control raises a fundamental question: do visual prediction and action generation require separate computational pathways? Existing approaches usually introduce trainable action heads or separate action experts to bridge low-dimensional states and high-dimensional visual representations. In this work, we explore whether the visual backbone's existing capacity can also support control when actions are expressed in a compatible representation. Thus, we introduce PatchWAM (Patch World-Action Model), which treats continuous actions as another type of patch through a fixed mapping called Action-as-Patch. This allows a single model to predict both how the robot should move and what the scene may look like afterward. Visual prediction and action generation become parts of the same generative process, without a dedicated action head or separate action expert. Experiments with subsampled training windows show gains over a matched dual-expert control, while benchmark evaluations reach 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-Plus and 96.12% on RoboTwin 2.0 in a full-data setting with additional augmented demonstrations. More broadly, the result suggests that capability need not be added where it can be inherited: the constraint on extending a generative backbone is the interface a new signal is written in, not the capacity to model it.

Video world models enable interactive exploration of dynamic environments, yet struggle to respect prior observations over long horizons and across viewpoints. We present WorldCrafter, a video world model that learns a camera-queryable implicit 3D-aware memory for this purpose. The key insight is to let the requested viewpoint shape how multi-view evidence is compressed into the video generator's limited token budget. Trained jointly with the video generator, a memory encoder and pose-conditioned readout module integrate historical observations into a fixed set of target view-specific tokens before denoising, without explicit depth-based correspondences. By combining this memory with recent temporal context and few-step distillation, WorldCrafter enables streaming scene exploration from a single input image or text prompt. Experiments across static and dynamic scenes show substantial gains in long-horizon consistency and camera-control accuracy while preserving visual quality during minute-scale exploration.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly generate robot actions and predict future world states, transferring priors from video pretraining to robot control. However, future visual prediction is computationally expensive, so existing WAMs often rely on long action chunks to amortize inference cost across control steps, at the cost of closed-loop responsiveness. We present \method, a dual-system WAM that preserves broader-horizon world-action generation while enabling high-frequency closed-loop action updates by decoupling global planning and local refinement. \systwo periodically performs high-noise bidirectional denoising over a broader world-action chunk to establish a global plan, while wrist-only \sysone extracts a temporally aligned short window from the intermediate denoising state and completes low-noise refinement using the latest wrist observations, which provide action-aligned cues about local geometry, motion, and contact during interaction. The two systems operate asynchronously along a shared denoising trajectory: each global plan is reused across multiple local updates, while \sysone repeatedly incorporates fresh interaction feedback. Across zero-shot manipulation tasks on Franka and Galbot, \method improves success over the strongest evaluated baseline by 4.5 percentage points on average, while achieving a 16.6$\times$ critical-path speedup. Further studies show that role-matched egocentric and UMI data improve success by 14 percentage points, and that the decoupled design naturally supports edge--cloud deployment with substantially lower communication overhead than the baseline.

Latent world models predict the consequences of actions, but accurate prediction does not guarantee that latent distance reflects which candidate will execute successfully. We identify a decision-local prediction gap: among the few futures competing for execution, a candidate predicted closer to the goal can produce a worse realized outcome than an available alternative. We introduce D-JEPA, a decision-aligned latent world model that learns decision-relevant relations among candidate futures from executed outcomes. A bounded, permutation-equivariant operator jointly reasons over goal-relative predictive features and ordinal evidence, refining pretrained predictive geometry where action choices are most consequential. Restricted predictor adaptation and a shared ordinal interface extend this alignment across complementary predictive geometries. D-JEPA further realizes the learned decision structure in JEPA-compatible future representations, enabling deployment through native latent-distance planning. Evaluations across latent control, manipulation, pretrained action-producing models, physical robots and autonomous driving demonstrate improved action selection, including 87.89% success on PushT, a 15.04-point average gain on RoboTwin, and a 17-point gain on physical robot tasks. These results establish decision-relevant relational structure as a direct bridge between predictive world modeling and effective control.

World action models generate actions together with visual predictions of their consequences. These paired outputs create the potential for planning by sampling multiple actions from one state, comparing their imagined outcomes, and choosing the action with the most promising predicted outcome. However, how to use imagined futures to guide action selection remains unclear. We examine this planning potential empirically. First, we estimate an oracle upper bound on selection by choosing the sampled candidate whose realised outcome is best. In a controlled same-state analysis, this choice raises success from 68.9% under uniform random selection to 79.2%. We then test selectors based on visual quality, physical consistency, and task progression as controlled interventions. Some tested selectors yield higher observed success, but the gains are uneven and the matched selectors leave much of the measured opportunity unrecovered. To investigate this gap, we examine whether sampled actions lead to different outcomes, whether these differences are visible in the predictions, and whether a score recognises them. Counterfactual branching from the same states shows that selection opportunity is concentrated in relatively few decisions in the initial candidate sets. Action spread and outcome coverage need not increase together. In a further evaluation across trajectory phases with complete action execution, the tested scores again recover little of the available improvement despite a small gain from learned value. These findings distinguish producing consequential action choices from recognising them in generated futures, motivating the evaluation of WAM predictions through their usefulness for decisions rather than visual quality alone.

Latent world models learn predictive representations for autonomous driving, but the relational semantics these states preserve often remain implicit. We investigate whether traffic scene graphs can serve as privileged semantic supervision for latent world representations. Building on LAW, we construct actor-centric scene graphs from nuScenes 3D annotations, encode their serialized relational structure using a frozen text embedding model, and align the visual latent representations with this semantic target during training. We remove the supervision branch at inference, so it requires neither scene graphs nor 3D annotations and adds no test-time computation. On nuScenes, our method reduces average trajectory L2 error from 0.661 to 0.622 (5.9%) and collision rate from 0.456 to 0.217 (52.4%) relative to our retrained LAW baseline. It also outperforms an unstructured caption-style semantic target, supporting the benefit of explicit relational structure for latent world-model representation learning.

World models aim to capture environmental dynamics and predict future trajectories, showing growing potential for embodied intelligence. Physics-informed 4D generation integrates physical simulation to predict 3D object interactions, offering a promising pathway toward world models. However, this paradigm relies on manually imposed dynamical assumptions rather than internalizing world dynamics, and thus still leaves a gap toward a true world model. To bridge this gap, we propose NeuIDO, a novel world dynamics modeling framework that learns a unified intrinsic dynamics representation from visual observations, advancing physics-informed 4D generation toward a world model. Specifically, we formulate world modeling as a neural operator learning problem and introduce a two-stage training strategy to learn a generalizable mapping from the visual observation distribution to the intrinsic dynamics distribution. Building on this observation-dynamics mapping, NeuIDO enables zero-shot dynamics inference directly from videos and can be further aligned with complex real-world dynamics via few-shot adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuIDO effectively unifies the intrinsic dynamics underlying diverse visual observations into a shared representation and rapidly infers dynamics in novel scenes.

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalizable robot control. Despite the growing number of WAM systems, existing works often introduce unified systems that bundle together multiple design choices, such as architecture and training strategy, making it difficult to isolate individual contributions and systematically compare alternative designs. In this work, we present a controlled study that disentangles these design choices and analyzes not only their empirical effects, but also how and why they shape WAMs. More specifically, we focus on three fundamental questions in building WAMs: (1) what causal structure should govern the interaction between world modeling and action generation? (2) in which latent space should world modeling be performed? and (3) how do different world-action modeling objectives affect model behavior and performance? Through structurally controlled experiments on three representative benchmarks, RoboCasa-GR1, LIBERO, and LIBERO-Plus, we systematically compare six causal structures, eight latent representations, and four training objectives, covering popular design choices in existing WAMs. We further validate our key findings on real-robot data from the DROID dataset. We hope to provide a systematic understanding of how core design choices affect world-action modeling and what principles can guide the development of future WAM systems.

Generative world models aim to predict future states conditioned on actions, where action controllability is fundamental for reliable dynamics modeling. While recent efforts leverage simulator-generated data to enhance this capability, existing training pipelines face two fundamental limitations. First, static offline data collection leads to a distribution misalignment between training sets and the model's evolving error patterns, failing to resolve critical long-tail scenarios where dynamics predictions remain unreliable. Second, the standard objective of minimizing observational discrepancy often encourages the model to exploit spurious correlations instead of capturing the underlying action-effect causality. To address these limitations, we propose OnlineWM, an online training framework that continuously improves world modeling through active simulator interaction and causality-aware optimization. OnlineWM introduces two key innovations: (1) Active Online Learning: Instead of using fixed datasets, OnlineWM adaptively queries the simulator for new interaction sequences that target the model's current predictive weaknesses, ensuring high-utility data acquisition. (2) Causality-Aware Fine-Tuning: We propose a counterfactual learning strategy that contrasts the outcomes of different actions from identical states, forcing the model to attribute state transitions to specific actions rather than ambient environmental evolution, thereby grounding its predictions in reliable causal mechanisms. By integrating active data acquisition with causal optimization, OnlineWM establishes a closed-loop refinement process that ensures the model is both robust to diverse scenarios and precise in its causal attribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OnlineWM significantly enhances action controllability and generalizes effectively to unseen domains.

LiDAR-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) exploration builds maps by continually selecting where to observe next. However, decisions based on the measured map provide limited foresight into spatial continuations behind occlusions, leaving potentially informative directions unrecognized. We present WOLF, a world-model-guided framework that predicts future observations to enhance autonomous exploration. In the training stage, a recurrent world model learns observation dynamics from exploration trajectories, with recurrent memory retaining the spatial context needed to interpret partial observations across successive views. Building on this context, the model combines observation history with candidate motions during exploration to predict local occupancy and visibility. To guide further sensing, a predictive frontier generation mechanism then aligns and fuses these predictions using confidence, branch agreement, and observation quality to identify promising regions. The resulting predictive frontiers join measured ones to guide geometric viewpoint selection and trajectory generation, while new scans update subsequent predictions. In simulations, our method reduces mean terminal time by 10.9% relative to EPIC in Garage at comparable coverage and increases mean coverage from 42.12% to 98.35% in Tunnel. Real-world experiments further demonstrate onboard deployment of the learned model for online inference during physical flight.

Embodied world models learn to predict future physical dynamics from visual observations and control signals, where physical knowledge is implicitly entangled within latent representations. We introduce CausalWM, a 16B embodied world model that performs explicit causal chain-of-thought reasoning before future video prediction. CausalWM organizes useful variables into a reasoning trajectory, allowing the model to progressively capture causal dependencies underlying physical evolution. To train CausalWM, we collect 31K hours embodied data and develop a three-stage paradigm consisting of large-scale video pre-training, causal CoT mid-training, and multi-objective RL post-training. Despite using only a limited set of supervised CoT variables, CausalWM exhibits emergent in-context learning capabilities, enabling contextual visual feature guidance and efficient few-step generation. CausalWM achieves state-of-the-art performance across language-conditioned, action-conditioned, single-view and multi-view benchmarks, including Top-1 performance on TriWorldBench leaderboard.

World modeling enables intelligence to anticipate consequences, guide interventions, and learn from interaction. Yet predictive models remain domain-specific: can a common learning principle support world modeling across radically different systems? We introduce JEPA-Anything, a domain-agnostic framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization (OPF). Extending joint-embedding predictive architectures, OPF decomposes latent targets into complementary factors, learns them through dedicated pathways, and recombines them within a shared predictive design. We evaluate JEPA-Anything across seven domains: vision, biology, clinical trajectories, control, molecular dynamics, physical fields, and weather. Experiments span representation learning, intervention prediction, out-of-distribution generalization, and long-horizon dynamics, including 10 matched dynamics tasks, forecasting of over 1,000 clinical events, and 100-step molecular rollouts across four systems. Against matched JEPA baselines, JEPA-Anything improves reported metrics on all 10 dynamics tasks and reduces single-intervention prediction error on Interventional Pong by 34.8%. It achieves the lowest one-step and 100-step molecular errors among compared methods in all four systems. Beyond prediction, a factor-nominated biological intervention receives experimental support in cell co-cultures, patient-derived organoids, tumor fragments, and mice; latent orbital modes recover the Keplerian scaling exponent with a fitted slope of -1.4991. These results support a common factorized predictive principle across heterogeneous worlds, connecting world modeling with intervention and experimentally grounded scientific discovery. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/JEPA-Anything

World Action Models (WAMs) advance beyond conventional visuomotor policies by jointly predicting future world states and robot actions, enabling the policy to learn physical dynamics that support effective control. However, recent tactile WAMs often rely on large-scale pretrained generative backbones to capture contact-rich physical dynamics, which limit their inference efficiency and flexible deployment. In this paper, we present \ABBR{}, an agile tactile World Action Model for contact-rich robot control. \ABBR{} encodes visual and tactile observations into a shared latent that serves as the source of a direct vision-tactile-to-action flow-matching process, which can jointly generate latent representations of action chunks and future visual/tactile latents. A key observation is that vision and tactile signals evolve at inherently different timescales: adjacent visual frames are often highly similar, whereas tactile signals can change abruptly upon contact. We therefore introduce multi-horizon multimodal prediction in \ABBR{}, which provides supervision for visual latent at a larger temporal offset while predicting the tactile latent in the next frame to capture fine-grained contact dynamics. Across nine simulated and five real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, \ABBR{} demonstrates strong and robust performance, outperforming the strongest baseline in success rate while maintaining low inference latency. In particular, in five real-world experiments, \ABBR{} yields a relative gain of $\textbf{29.4\%}$ in overall success rates while achieving inference latency of $\textbf{11.9 ms}$. These results demonstrate that multimodal WAM can be achieved with an agile architecture suitable for precise and high-frequency robot control. More details are available on our project page: https://hanchuzhou.github.io/TARO_project_page/.

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by incorporating future dynamics, yet explicitly generating future videos at inference introduces substantial computational overhead. Removing future generation improves efficiency, but leaves future dynamics only implicitly encoded in observation features, which can limit robustness under distribution shifts. We propose MoWAM, an efficient WAM that replaces future video generation with explicit future motion prediction. Instead of reconstructing the complete future scene, MoWAM models structured robot motion as a compact abstraction of the future, capturing how the robot is expected to evolve under the current scene and interaction constraints. A Mixture-of-Transformer architecture learns future visual dynamics during training while jointly predicting motion and action, allowing video generation to be removed entirely at inference while retaining an explicit representation of the future. The compact motion representation further enables efficient inference-time scaling by sampling multiple candidates of motion and action pairs and selecting among them with a motion-aware task-progress verifier. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that MoWAM achieves strong in-distribution performance, improved out-of-distribution robustness, and higher average real-world success than representative WAM baselines. In addition, performance improves as more candidates are explored, demonstrating that explicit future motion provides an effective and efficient basis for inference-time scaling.

This paper presents a real-time semantic world modeling framework specialized for precision agriculture using autonomous robots. The framework combines probabilistic mapping of objects and their semantic attributes, updated through Bayesian inference, with a graph-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach implemented using $g^2o$, a general framework for graph optimization. This integration enables accurate mapping and localization without relying solely on GPS. By leveraging semantic information such as plant type, size, and health, the robot can perform tasks while mapping and localizing itself within a field of crops. The proposed framework was validated through Gazebo simulations and physical experiments on an indoor field with artificial plants using Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot. A YOLOv8n object detection model was trained to extract object and semantic data from depth camera observations. These simulations and experiments demonstrate that the system can successfully perform real-time mapping of up to at least 400 plants.

Autonomous driving involves coupled decision-making and scene evolution under multi-mode uncertainty. To capture this coupling and uncertainty, we introduce MM-Future, a world-action model that generates multiple paired scene-action hypotheses and models bidirectional interaction within each pair. Each hypothesis is initialized from a structured action prior and an independent future scene source, which are then co-evolved through a modality-aware diffusion Transformer. To support efficient multi-mode rollout, MM-Future compresses multi-view video into planning-oriented representations, dubbed MM-Tokens. Finally, a future-conditioned proposal scorer ranks trajectory candidates by shared history context and their paired predicted future. On NAVSIM navtest, MM-Future achieves 94.0 PDMS and 91.5 EPDMS, while attaining a 32.3 HD-Score in zero-shot closed-loop evaluation on HUGSIM. Ablations show consistent improvements over both single-mode and action-only variants, validating the benefit of multi-mode joint world-action modeling.

We present Astronex-World 1.0, an open controllable video world-model foundation. Given a text prompt (text-to-video) or an initial observation (image-to-video), the model predicts future visual states under frame-aligned camera trajectories, continuous actions, and an embodiment identifier, and accepts text events inserted at a specified position of a rollout. The family provides a bidirectional model for full-context generation and a causal model with block-causal attention and cross-block KV caching for persistent generation, both built on the Wan2.2-TI2V-5B prior. PRoPE injects camera intrinsics and extrinsics, while a 64-dimensional action stream modulates every Transformer layer. A five-stage training path develops bidirectional camera and action control, converts the backbone to block-causal generation, distills a few-step student, restores mixed-domain dynamics, and applies asymmetric DMD/DMD2 distribution matching. The causal model generates 832x480 video at 24 fps. All five training stages run on two NVIDIA L20 48 GB GPUs, and the causal model streams in real time on one. It scores 73.5 on WBench Navi and 70.0 on WBench Full. On Full, this 5B model is above the 13.6B LongCat-Video and the 14B Helios, within one point of the 22B LTX-2.3, and above YUME 1.5, which is post-trained from the same 5B prior on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The reserved action input and output interfaces allow post-training for embodied intelligence and autonomous driving.

Long-horizon robot manipulation requires not only stable local visuomotor control, but also continuous target tracking and reliable task progress assessment throughout execution. This challenge becomes particularly critical when multiple objects share identical appearances and must be manipulated in a prescribed order. In such scenarios, relying solely on a limited-horizon manipulation policy is often insufficient to determine which instance should be operated on and when the task should transition to the next stage. To address this challenge, we propose MaskHarness-WAM, an instance-grounded harness for long-horizon manipulation. The proposed system connects high-level task planning with low-level manipulation policies through target masks, while leveraging visual feedback for subtask scheduling and continuous execution. Since each subtask corresponds to a different target instance, the low-level policy requires a newly established initial target mask under the updated scene at each subtask transition. The harness continuously re-observes the environment, generates, and verifies the target mask at subtask boundaries, thereby updating the instance-level spatial condition provided to the low-level policy. Furthermore, the system advances the manipulation process by switching target instances according to the verified completion status of each subtask. Experiments on a real robot platform demonstrate that MaskHarness-WAM substantially outperforms limited-horizon policies on sequential multi-object manipulation, showing its effectiveness in extending local manipulation skills to reliable long-horizon execution.

Navigation world models plan by foresight, predicting the future that each candidate action sequence produces and selecting the best, rather than mapping observations to actions directly. Unlike urban settings where a predicted scene is a sufficient proxy, off-road navigation hinges on the robot--terrain interaction, so the prediction must cover not only what the camera will see but what the robot will feel. However, existing scene-focused models do not predict how much the robot will slip, tilt or shake along a planned trajectory. Proprioception captures these dynamics directly and, when used as input, improves the prediction of the physical future. We present Feel-WM, the first off-road navigation world model that conditions on proprioception and predicts what the robot will feel alongside what the camera will see. The physical future takes the form of a future proprioceptive state and a failure risk, both learned from the robot's own experience without human labels. The planner rolls out the physical future alongside the scene and weighs the predicted failure risk against goal similarity in a separable score. Experiments on real off-road data and in simulation demonstrate that Feel-WM outperforms visual-only navigation world models in open-loop planning and closed-loop rough-terrain navigation across wheeled and legged platforms. Deployed on a Husky on mountain trails, Feel-WM plans onboard, predicts rough ground ahead and steers around it, completing courses that an end-to-end policy fails.

A learned simulator can reproduce its training conditions accurately yet fail in two distinct ways once those conditions change. Over long rollouts, small errors accumulate until the trajectory drifts away from physically plausible behavior; under an intervention on a physical parameter, the model may continue to follow the law seen during training rather than the intervened one. We show that these two failures require different structural remedies. Evolving a learned energy with a symplectic integrator preserves the geometry of the conservative dynamics and keeps rollouts bounded and physically meaningful for up to $100\times$ the training horizon, while equal-capacity predictors, an energy-regularized predictor, and a tuned neural ODE diverge. By contrast, encoding the physical coupling through an explicit linear factorization enables the model to follow a never-seen sign of that coupling, whereas an unrestricted parameterization remains locked to the training law. Crucially, the two mechanisms are separable: removing the structure responsible for long-horizon stability leaves counterfactual transfer intact, while removing the factorized coupling destroys counterfactual transfer without eliminating stability. This double dissociation, established with matched controls that remove or replace one structural component at a time, persists beyond the headline three-body system and remains visible when the physical state must be inferred from pixels rather than provided directly. The result is a concrete design principle for physical world models: long-horizon stability and changed-law generalization arise from distinct structural commitments, and each can be imposed deliberately without requiring the other.

Adapting robots to new objects and tasks requires interaction experience that can be costly to obtain. We present WorldContact, a contact-centric world model for deformable-object manipulation, constructed from a limited set of high-quality trajectories to generate additional training data efficiently. It predicts object dynamics using larger time steps than the source numerical simulator, which requires small integration steps to resolve rapid motion and prevent interpenetration. We evaluate WorldContact across 16 shopping-bag manipulation tasks. State-rollout measurements on a single H100 GPU show a $10\times$ speedup over the source simulator, excluding rendering and disk I/O. We use the generated data to fine-tune an existing vision-language-action policy and deploy it directly on a real robot. In bag lifting, the same policy achieves 65% single-attempt success when fine-tuned on source simulation data alone, compared with 95% when fine-tuned on the dataset expanded with WorldContact. These results support efficient data generation with WorldContact for robot policy adaptation.

In an enterprise system, updating one field can set another, create a record, or start an approval. These effects are produced by business rules that are not built into the platform but written by each organization and revised over time. An agent working in such a system cannot predict the result of its own actions without knowing these rules. We study continual enterprise world model discovery, where an agent starts without knowledge of these business rules and discovers them by interacting with records and observing the outcomes. From those observations it builds a world model, which it revises as the rules change. To evaluate this, we introduce EnterpriseWorldShift, built on a live ServiceNow environment with nine tables, 25 hidden rules and 600 evaluation actions. It presents four versions of the same enterprise world, with the tables and records held fixed while a rule is modified, then added, then removed, so that discovery, revision, extension and retirement are each tested in turn. Our Continual Discovery Agent (CDA) builds such a model and carries it from one world to the next. It predicts the effects of the hidden rules more accurately than looking them up for each question, the approach taken by prior work, by up to 8.98 IoU points, and it answers from its own model without querying the running system.

World action models (WAMs) rely on video-generation backbones, requiring substantial memory and compute for deployment. Post-training quantization reduces memory and can accelerate inference, but bit width, grouping, and quantizer choice define a large configuration space. Identifying configurations that preserve task performance through exhaustive closed-loop evaluation is costly. We propose PreDE (Predict Before You Deploy), a policy-calibrated framework for predicting quantization-induced task degradation from offline action deviations. Using closed-loop outcomes from a small development set, PreDE calibrates two thresholds and accepts, rejects, or defers new configurations using a fixed observation log. Under a within-setting label-ordering hypothesis, the rule issues decisions where all thresholds consistent with the development labels agree. Across five WAMs and four benchmark settings, quantization produces configuration-dependent task losses that cannot be explained by bit width alone or a shared deviation threshold. Across 28 held-out configurations from two policies, PreDE issued 21 decisions before observing closed-loop outcomes (75% coverage), all matching the observed acceptable or degraded labels. Deferred candidates included both acceptable outcomes and a 33-percentage-point loss. In 450 Franka Research 3 trials across two independently fine-tuned policies, all configurations assigned to high-deviation groups before testing showed significant degradation, while low-deviation comparisons showed no statistically significant degradation. On the real robot, W4A4 achieved a 1.37x action-query speedup and approximately 44% lower peak memory. These results support policy-specific behavioral calibration for quantization configuration selection while identifying candidates that require closed-loop evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/jiuyixu25/PreDE.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a flexible interface for long-horizon robot planning, but generated plans often fail to respect embodiment constraints, recover from planning errors, or reason effectively under partial observability. We present GAVEL, a framework for verifying and repairing long-horizon LLM planning built around an explicit graph world model. The graph represents relevant object-relations, action pre-conditions and effects, and probabilistic beliefs over unobserved object locations. This model can predict the consequences of LLM-generated actions before execution, detect violations, and repair those whose corrections follow directly from the world model. This method also reserves LLM replanning solely for errors requiring semantic reasoning. For multi-task instructions, GAVEL reasons over distributions of possible object locations to reorder remaining subtasks and minimize expected search cost. We evaluate GAVEL on BEHAVIOR-1K across 100 single long-horizon tasks and 500 multi-task instructions. With Qwen3-8B, GAVEL improves single-task success from 41.2% to 91.8% and multi-task success from 19.9% to 92.6%. Distributional belief reasoning also reduces travel distance by approximately 5.4% compared with a static variant. These improvements show that an explicit graph world model harness can substantially improve the reliability and efficiency of long-horizon embodied planning across compact and frontier hosted LLM capabilities.

Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act. Action-labeled robot videos directly supervise control but are costly and limited in diversity, whereas egocentric human videos capture diverse interactions but lack robot actions and differ in embodiment and appearance. We introduce AffordanceWAM, an affordance-aware generative World Action Model that represents object-centric spatiotemporal affordance through Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmap, within the generated future World. This representation grounds visual prediction in task-relevant objects and interaction regions for action generation, and provides shared interaction targets across human and robot videos. Built on a pretrained video diffusion Transformer, AffordanceWAM uses separately parameterized World and Action Experts, coupled through Masked Joint Self-Attention, to jointly predict future RGB observations, Scalar Affordance fields, Affordance Heatmaps, and continuous robot actions under a unified flow-matching objective. Human videos supervise all three future-World streams, whereas robot trajectories additionally provide action supervision, enabling transfer without human action labels or retargeting. Experiments on RoboCasa, CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D, and real-world manipulation demonstrate consistent gains over RGB-only and robot-data-only baselines. Under fixed robot supervision, RoboCasa performance improves monotonically as affordance-annotated human video scales. These results support affordance as an effective interface for both vision-language-action learning and human-to-robot transfer.

FastWAM-style world action models enable efficient action-only inference, but generalize poorly under visual distribution shifts. Their reconstruction-oriented representations emphasize appearance-specific details, limiting generalization to unseen scenes and objects. Without observation history, the model also lacks temporal evidence for robustly identifying task-relevant state changes and motion in unfamiliar visual conditions. To address these limitations, we present the Causal Semantic World Action Model (CSWAM), which augments FastWAM with a causal semantic expert built on V-JEPA 2.1. V-JEPA provides temporally grounded representations of semantic state changes and motion with less dependence on appearance-specific details. The expert learns their future evolution from a sparse history of current and past observations and shares the history-derived context with both the video and action streams through causal attention. At inference, CSWAM conditions action denoising on the current video state and observed semantic history, retaining efficient action-only inference. We conduct simulation and real-robot experiments to evaluate generalization under distribution shifts. With embodied pretraining, CSWAM raises Randomized success on RoboTwin 2.0 Clean-to-Randomized transfer from 10.16% to 45.18%, a gain of 35.02 percentage points over FastWAM. Across two real-robot tasks and three OOD difficulty levels, CSWAM improves average success over FastWAM by 42.5 percentage points, from 27.5% to 70.0%.

Safe motion planning in automated driving requires anticipating evolving traffic risks and deciding when to revise the current planned trajectory. We introduce RiskWorld, a risk-aware world modeling framework for shared occupancy forecasting and selective trajectory replacement. Spatial risk fields and temporal actor context are fused with visual bird's-eye-view features. Flow-guided evolution transports occupancy and scene features, while signed residuals correct occupancy after transport. One forecast is generated per planning step and reused across candidates. Each candidate is compared with a current-state persistence reference, yielding a nonnegative collision-score correction. The trajectory selected by current-world evaluation serves as the planning anchor and is replaced only when additional predicted risk triggers intervention and an alternative satisfies component-wise constraints on predicted risk and trajectory error. Candidate geometries remain unchanged. We evaluate RiskWorld for open-loop planning on nuScenes using camera features, annotation-derived current and historical actor states, and dataset-provided map context. RiskWorld achieves the lowest collision rate at a long evaluation horizon of 3 s, and the second-best average L2 error among various state-of-the-art baselines, while running at 11.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 with 90.81 M parameters. Within-setting ablations show that RiskWorld achieves lower collision rates than the current-state rescoring baseline, while forecast reuse enables additional candidates to be evaluated at low marginal computational cost.

Humanoid whole-body manipulation requires coordinated whole-body dynamics, yet large-scale trajectories from a target robot are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, whole-body motion from human and humanoid sources is abundantly available, although such data cannot be directly used as embodiment-specific robot actions. This work asks whether these scalable motion resources can instead provide a transferable predictive prior for humanoid world-action modeling. We introduce WholeBodyWAM, a humanoid world-action model that learns whole-body dynamics from large-scale heterogeneous motion before target-robot training. We curate UniMotion-4K, a motion corpus spanning more than 4K hours from human videos, native 3D motion datasets, and heterogeneous humanoid platforms, and canonicalize these diverse sources into a unified motion space. A language-conditioned Motion Expert is then pretrained to predict future whole-body motion without target-robot action supervision. During robot post-training, the pretrained Motion Expert is integrated with Video and Action Experts through asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention, enabling predictive scene dynamics and whole-body motion to jointly inform embodiment-specific action generation. Experiments show that WholeBodyWAM consistently benefits from increased motion-pretraining scale, improves future-motion prediction and downstream task performance, and transfers effectively to real-world humanoid manipulation. Moreover, the pretrained motion prior substantially improves data efficiency under limited target-robot demonstrations.

World-action models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation by jointly modeling future visual dynamics and robot actions. However, existing WAMs are trained predominantly on successful trajectories, making them prone to failure when real-world execution diverges from the learned dynamics. This issue is amplified in autoregressive WAMs, where execution errors become part of the causal history and continue to influence subsequent predictions. To this end, we introduce \method{}, a training-free framework that reformulates failure recovery as \emph{test-time scaling over causal histories}. This formulation decomposes recovery into three coupled decisions: \emph{when} to revise the causal history, \emph{where} to recover a reliable history prefix, and \emph{which} history configuration best supports subsequent execution. Specifically, \method{} realizes these decisions through three stages: 1) \textbf{Progress-Aware Recovery Trigger} detects persistent non-progress and triggers recovery only when the current execution state permits intervention; 2) \textbf{History-Prefix Recovery} identifies the unreliable history suffix, retrieves a historical anchor matching the current physical state, and reconstructs the causal KV state from the retained prefix while conditioning on the latest real observation; and 3) \textbf{Hypothesis Verification} compares the future continuations induced by complete-history, recovered-prefix, and full-reset hypotheses, and commits the best-supported hypothesis. Experiments in both simulated and real-world manipulation settings demonstrate consistent improvements in task success, while ablations confirm the contribution of each recovery stage.

World-action models (WAMs) jointly model future observations and actions, typically predicting the future as RGB images. Other visual modalities such as depth, pretrained visual features, and point tracks can more efficiently capture geometric, semantic, and motion features. However, how best to combine these modalities within WAMs remains an open question. We introduce ModAR, the first WAM to autoregressively denoise multiple future modalities before predicting actions. This allows each prediction to condition on previously generated modalities. We train from scratch to systematically study how training-data mixtures, predicted modalities, and WAM formulations affect performance. In our evaluations, WAMs benefit from predicting point tracks, DINO features, and depth maps, while additionally predicting future RGB does not provide a consistent benefit. We also find that ModAR's sequential generation outperforms existing WAM formulations, with the highest average success rate at all evaluated data scales. We also fine-tune the video-model-initialized WAM Flex-$π$ on the same data; ModAR achieves a slightly higher observed average success rate (75% vs. 72%) while using approximately $20\times$ fewer training FLOPs and no pretraining. On three real-world bimanual tasks, ModAR outperforms baselines and improves with human videos.

A general-purpose robot needs to draw on diverse experience, choose actions, and anticipate how those actions will change the world. We introduce XPACE, a unified embodied world model that serves as both a world action model, jointly predicting executable robot actions and future video, and a world simulator, predicting the visual consequences of prescribed actions. Our key insight is that video prediction can both connect heterogeneous experience to action learning and generate new experience for policy improvement. With a shared video backbone between the policy and simulator, we use action-unlabeled video to learn visual dynamics and action-labeled human and robot demonstrations to jointly learn video and action prediction. Building on this architecture, a coarse-to-fine training curriculum progressively emphasizes robot control while retaining human experience, allowing the policy to learn behaviors beyond those covered by robot demonstrations. Beyond learning from recorded experience, XPACE uses its simulator to create additional recovery supervision for the policy. Specifically, we adapt the simulator to its own generated context, synthesize deviation-recovery trajectories around expert demonstrations, and fine-tune the policy on filtered recovery examples. Experiments on XPENG's IRON humanoid robot show that heterogeneous training improves robustness and enables transfer of human-observed skills to tasks absent from robot demonstrations, while recovery data generated by the model's own simulator further improves real-world task completion. Together, these results demonstrate how joint world and action modeling connects learning from heterogeneous experience with simulation-driven policy self-improvement.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models, world-action models (WAMs), and offline reinforcement learning methods are rapidly expanding the design space of embodied policies, yet turning these algorithms into reliable robot systems remains constrained by fragmented data formats, training stacks, evaluation protocols, inference runtimes, and embodiment-specific interfaces. We present $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ Engine, an open, configuration-driven platform that turns heterogeneous embodied-policy components into a reproducible data-to-deployment workflow. Rather than introducing another policy model, $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ standardizes interfaces for datasets, visual-language and world models, action heads, reward- or advantage-weighted learning, distributed training, simulation evaluation, optimized inference, and robot operators. The engine further integrates compositional dual-arm simulation, scalable automatic data generation, and model-decoupled human-in-the-loop rollout, takeover, correction collection, and reward annotation. For responsive physical execution, it combines Real-Time Chunking (RTC) with accelerated inference backends, lightweight remote GPU serving, and configurable trajectory post-processing. Together, these capabilities connect offline learning, simulation validation, online correction, and real-robot execution through shared and auditable contracts. $\mathrm{FluxVLA}$ therefore targets the engineering bottlenecks separating promising embodied-learning algorithms from reproducible evaluation and dependable deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/FluxVLA/FluxVLA

Local image watermarking embeds an invisible signal into selected image regions rather than spreading it across the entire image, enabling payload recovery from specific objects or regions without perceptibly altering the image. Existing studies evaluate the robustness of payload recovery and localization under image transformations, but they often focus on their own proposed method, resulting in narrow evaluations with inconsistent choices of transformations, datasets, and metrics. These inconsistencies across studies limit direct comparisons across methods and muddle the overall picture of local watermark robustness. To address this gap, we present the first systematic robustness benchmark for local watermarks across 55 image transformations, including (i) signal distortions, (ii) changes in image coordinate alignment, (iii) indirect local edits, and (iv) direct watermark edits. The benchmark evaluates MaskWM, WAM, OmniGuard, TrustMark, and PixelSeal, all methods that either provide native localization or require minimal adaptation to support it. Our results show that all evaluated methods are vulnerable to some transformation, with MaskWM standing out as offering the strongest payload recovery and localization, although it has the lowest image quality in the clean setting. Synchronization further improves MaskWM's payload recovery under several geometric transformations, albeit at an additional cost to image quality. A key finding is that local watermark robustness depends strongly on the nature of the transformation: signal distortions are often tolerated by the strongest methods, while geometric misalignment and generative local edits, such as inpainting and outpainting, can completely impair payload recovery. We observe that payload recovery and localization are related but not interchangeable, and both strongly depend on the transformation's impact on the watermark region.

Safe local planning requires forecasting surrounding-agent motion and evaluating candidate-specific risks, since identical agent motion can pose different risks to different ego trajectories. We present CorrRisk-WM, a planning-oriented partial world model coupling environment evolution with supervised intrusion and near-miss prediction over bounded candidate-trajectory corridors. A latent environment model recursively predicts agent states and updates agent-agent and agent-map interactions. Each candidate queries the evolving environment through footprint- aware geometry and learned agent-corridor representations. A lightweight recurrent risk module uses temporal context to estimate per-slice hazards; survival aggregation yields first-entry and horizon-level event probabilities. On 29,176 scenarios from 100 Waymo validation shards, CorrRisk-WM achieves intrusion average precision (AP) of 0.8567 and 1-m near-miss first-entry AP of 0.8671. In baseline comparisons, it attains the highest near-miss AP at all three distance thresholds and the lowest observed open-loop collision rate (4.88%), with route progress of 15.35 m. Across three seeds, removing dynamic environment modeling or candidate-conditioned geometric interaction reduces mean intrusion AP from 0.8590 to 0.7624 and 0.7252, respectively. These results support coupling environment evolution with candidate-conditioned geometric reasoning for risk prediction and safety-oriented candidate selection.

World models connect perception and decision-making in embodied intelligence by maintaining hidden state, anticipating consequences, comparing interventions, and adapting when execution departs from expectations. Although progress is often measured by visual fidelity, their value lies in improving behavior. Before reaching for a cup, a person anticipates its weight and resistance to grasping, shaping the hand before contact. Such anticipation is coarse and rarely pictorial, yet it guides action. This raises a central question: which predictive capabilities improve behavior? Existing surveys, organized by architecture, output modality, or application domain, leave this question implicit. We introduce three progressively stronger capability levels: Plausible models preserve task-relevant temporal, geometric, or physical structure; Controllable models additionally predict how interventions alter that structure; and Actionable models translate predictions into measurable gains in planning, action, learning, evaluation, verification, recovery, or data selection. We complement this hierarchy with a 3 x 4 matrix crossing geometry, physics, and action grounding with improvement loops centered on data, rewards, policies, and the model itself. Using this framework, we survey manipulation, navigation, locomotion, autonomous driving, and general embodied learning, tracing technical progressions, clarifying capability requirements, and examining datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. We identify challenges in long-horizon consistency, uncertainty calibration, causal intervention testing, latency, verification and recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. This perspective shifts evaluation from visual plausibility toward whether predictions capture task-relevant state, reflect intervention effects, and improve the closed-loop behavior of embodied agents.

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising approach to general-purpose robot manipulation by jointly modeling visual dynamics and actions. However, most WAM studies focus on tabletop or arm-centric manipulation, while humanoid loco-manipulation remains less explored. To address this gap, we introduce WholeBodyWAM, which jointly predicts future visual dynamics, manipulation actions, and whole-body control intents for generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation. It preserves pre-trained world-action priors while grounding heterogeneous whole-body controller (WBC) semantics and coordinating whole-body behavior. Extensive experiments show that WholeBodyWAM achieves an overall simulation task success rate of 91.9%, with a 0.23 improvement in real-world out-of-distribution task progress and a 70% reduction in success-rate variance across WBCs relative to the respective baselines. These results suggest a path toward scalable humanoid whole-body intelligence by extending pre-trained world-action priors through structured WBC grounding and coordination, rather than relearning whole-body behavior from scratch. Project page: https://wholebodywam.github.io/.

We introduce loss-conditioned state execution, a model-agnostic method that decides whether to execute a world model's fixed feasible proposal or retain the current state. Predictive informativeness alone, however, does not establish whether an update will reduce downstream loss. Occurrence ranking can approach perfection while persistence remains the unique absolute-loss Bayes action. Two transition laws can also share occurrence information and conditional variance yet require opposite absolute-loss decisions. We formalize state movability as the existence of a loss-reducing feasible correction and distinguish it from the benefit of a particular proposal. Our method constructs a loss-specific feasible proposal from a predictive distribution and evaluates its groupwise bounded-loss gain over persistence on independent calibration units. The proposal is executed only in groups with a positive simultaneous lower confidence bound. For fixed proposals and groups with bounded unit losses, we prove that every accepted group has lower expected loss than persistence with high probability when calibration units are i.i.d. draws from the target population. Experiments on public forecasting and action-conditioned dynamics benchmarks show supported updates and a trade-off between certification and coverage. On 28,684 held-out M4 Monthly series, the method executes the proposal for 14.0% of series and achieves bounded loss 0.588, compared with 0.599 for persistence and 0.621 for always executing the proposal. The paired 95% bootstrap intervals for both comparisons lie below zero. In constrained forecasting of six unhealthy-inventory types from JD$\mbox{.}$com, a leading e-retailer in China, strong occurrence-ranking signal coexists with a loss-based preference for persistence, illustrating why event predictability and state execution must be evaluated separately.

Pretrained world models, learned simulators that encode an observation into a latent state and predict how it evolves under actions, are beginning to be reused as off-the-shelf dynamics backbones for control, like pretrained encoders and language models are reused today. We show that this reuse opens a supply-chain backdoor: an adversary who controls only a released checkpoint can hijack the downstream controller, even though the victim trains and evaluates entirely on clean data and never sees the trigger. The attack encodes no explicit trigger-to-action rule. Instead, the poisoned model routes trigger-bearing observations into a chosen latent region and reshapes the local dynamics there, so that the victim's own optimization (Dreamer-style actor training in imagination, or MPC/CEM planning over predicted futures) re-discovers the attacker's target action on its own. Across several control tasks and trigger families, the trigger steers the controller's action toward the attacker's target, controlling every action dimension and hijacking 100% of triggered steps on the strongest settings. The checkpoint still passes the clean-data diagnostics a victim would run before deployment, with clean-task success retaining at least $\sim$75%. The effect is temporally gated: it appears only while the trigger is present and disappears when the trigger is removed. Trigger-blind repair is budget-dependent: moderate clean fine-tuning can preserve clean utility while leaving the triggered failure intact, whereas sufficiently aggressive adaptation can remove it only after substantially degrading clean control. The world-model backbone itself is therefore an emerging and underexamined attack surface for control. The full code and artifacts are available in our repository.

World Action Models (WAMs) use video generation models to predict future visual dynamics for robotic manipulation, but iterative denoising introduces additional latency for closed-loop control. We empirically find that visual content converges at different rates during denoising. Static background structure forms early, whereas the gripper and manipulated object remain blurry after the first step, with their interaction dynamics emerging only through subsequent denoising. Consequently, naively truncating a multi-step video model to one step preserves scene structure but loses the interaction-centric dynamics most critical for manipulation. To address this issue, we propose DIDO, which distills the converged dynamics of a multi-step video model into a single denoising step. DIDO combines distribution matching distillation with interaction-centric representation guidance. Beyond compressing multi-step generation into one forward pass, DIDO explicitly models the gripper, manipulated object, and their interaction using supervised bounding-box visual reasoning tokens. Additionally, DIDO aligns the target object's representations across multiple model layers with features from a pretrained DINOv3 encoder. This interaction-centric guidance helps the distilled model preserve both the relevant entities and their future dynamics in a single step, while substantially reducing inference latency. DIDO achieves an average success rate of 99.0% on LIBERO, 76.6% on LIBERO-Plus, and 92.0% on RoboTwin, while also demonstrating effective transfer to long-horizon and generalization tasks in real-world robotic manipulation.

Wheel-loader excavation is a sequential decision problem in which every scoop changes the terrain available to subsequent actions. A practical world model must predict action consequences accurately, rank candidates in real time, and operate inside the closed loop of a full-size machine. We present the World-Action Model (WAM), which proposes multiple scoops, rejects geometrically inadmissible candidates, jointly predicts signed terrain change and loaded volume, executes the candidate with the largest predicted load, and replans from the newly observed terrain. On 32 geometry-disjoint MinSlope test episodes, adding world-model ranking to matched diffusion proposals reduces the mean scoop count from 651.8 to 540.6 (17.1%), preserves 32/32 completion, and improves every paired episode. In a complete-system comparison, WAM completes 32/32 episodes versus 29/32 for an independently trained soft actor-critic policy. Comparisons of input representations, spatial support, and five architectures identify an accurate and efficient physics-structured predictor. We further evaluate the interface on event-disjoint full-size-loader data and deploy the complete perception-proposal-prediction-selection-execution loop for autonomous excavation. The ROS2/TensorRT implementation processes five candidates in 72.4 ms on a Jetson AGX Orin. The simulation results establish decision-level gains, while the physical experiments demonstrate real-world closed-loop feasibility.

Humanoid robots must traverse cluttered obstacle fields using onboard proprioceptive and visual observations, yet existing methods usually process multimodal observations without explicitly considering their different characteristics: proprioceptive observations are low-dimensional but governed by highly nonlinear robot dynamics, while egocentric visual observations are high-dimensional, noisy, and redundant. We propose DWMP (Dual World Model Policy), a framework that provides the actor with separate but complementary world-model representations for humanoid obstacle traversal. A Koopman-based dynamics world model lifts proprioceptive observations into a latent space where their temporal evolution is approximately linear, making the dynamics features easier for the actor to learn from. An RSSM-based visual world model compresses egocentric depth observations into compact stochastic states while preserving obstacle-related geometry. The student policy receives the fused latent representation for action generation, combining linearized proprioceptive dynamics with compressed visual perception. Experiments in simulation and on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot show that DWMP improves obstacle traversal performance over baselines and supports real-world deployment under randomized obstacle layouts.

In this technical report, we propose Pelican-Sim 1.0, a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions to support downstream learning and decision making. The model incorporates four key design features: (1) Unified action representation: a 28-dimensional action value space covering most mainstream embodiments, keeping one model valid across heterogeneous devices. (2) Action-visual injection: URDF- and camera-rendered action videos bridge actions and pixels, giving markedly better controllability across embodiments, scenes, and tasks (PSNR +0.904 over alternative fusion baselines). (3) Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE): sparse MoE layers add capacity for heterogeneous dynamics and absorb the action modality while reducing inter-modality conflict (FVD -6.530 vs. the dense backbone). (4) Efficient rollout generation: causal adaptation and few-step distillation yield a four-step autoregressive simulator, achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Benefiting from these designs, we train on approximately one million real-world and simulated trajectories and obtain large gains in action controllability and video quality: PSNR improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin, with the adapted EWMBench DYN score up 0.426 on RoboTwin. Relying on this, four downstream applications on RoboTwin succeed: 500 generated trajectories added to 50 demonstrations per task raise policy success from 70% to 93%; policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994 across five checkpoints; and relative success gains reach 47.7% for action selection and 20.3% for policy improvement. Qualitative generalization across trajectory, scene, object, embodiment, and viewpoint shifts highlights its potential as a general-purpose world model simulator.

Video models increasingly use memory to preserve information over long sequences, with the assumption that gains come from retrieving and using the correct past content. Standard memory ablations test whether memory helps, but not whether the retrieved content is responsible. We test this directly with read-time memory substitution, which replaces the consumed memory value while leaving the rest of the computation unchanged. This separates memory benefit from memory specificity, the extent to which the gain depends on retrieved content. Across frozen video world models, identity-free controls containing no evaluation-specific content recover essentially the full benefit on Ego-Exo4D and 7-Scenes and about 70% on TUM. In the Ego-Exo4D dose response, recovery falls from 102% to 1% as these values move away from observed training-memory representations, supporting representation repair as the best-supported explanation in this setting. WorldMem shows graded dependence. A wrong memory from the same trajectory recovers 94.1% of the PSNR benefit relative to zero content, while a donor from a disjoint trajectory and biome recovers 43.7%. SAM 2 shows strong content dependence. On DAVIS, replacing the correct spatial memory with a valid wrong memory reduces mean region and boundary score from 0.926 to 0.182. At MOSEv2 reappearance, it falls from 0.459 to 0.000. These results show that memory gains can depend on generic representation support, broader context, or exact episodic content. Read-time substitution provides a direct way to distinguish them.

A world model asked what happens if an object is pushed at several speeds produces several futures. If the model has the object in mind, those futures agree about it: each implies the same mass and friction. The consistency checks now used to vet world-action models ask whether a model's futures agree with each other, and none of them knows any physics. We show that this is not enough, and what to do instead. IMPLY reads the physics each rollout implies by inverting a simulator and scores a set of rollouts by how well one object explains all of them, anchored to two calibration pushes the model has observed. In a controlled setting, self-consistency gives a perfect score to a model that ignores the object and always predicts a typical push; anchoring exposes it (AUROC 0.70 versus 1.00). On a real model, V-JEPA 2-AC adapted to the scene, the same thing happens. Given its own calibration pushes the model tracks the object (per-object correlation with the truth 0.91); given another object's, it does not (0.05). Self-consistency cannot tell these apart, preferring the right evidence on 52% of objects, chance level, while anchored disagreement prefers it on 73% and correlates 0.92-0.99 with the rollouts' error. Used to choose among candidate rollout sets, it comes within 0.003 of an oracle that sees the truth. A model that has internalised the wrong object is exactly as self-consistent as one that has internalised the right one; consistency has to be anchored to evidence.

World models, systems that generate what happens next given current environmental conditions, are increasingly being implemented with multi-modal generation in mind. However, generating multiple modalities simultaneously, such as visual simulations alongside physical state predictions in the form of text, introduces the risk of cross-modal inconsistency. Tested separately, both outputs may look convincing while still disagreeing: a model can calculate that a ball should rebound in one modality, then generate no rebound in another modality, to say nothing of diverging from real-world dynamics entirely. In this work we focus on two failures explicitly: \emph{Internal misalignment}, the disagreement between the world model's generated video and the same world model's prediction in a different modalities, and \emph{external misalignment} the disagreement between the world model's generation and an analytic physical environment. We derive common contracts of event, magnitude, timing, and construct a physics grounded pipeline to make comparisons measurable in both external and internal settings. We then ask whether progressively supplying the model's own contract (the A ladder for the internal setting) or a corrected physical contract (the B ladder for the external setting) closes the respective gaps. Across four mechanisms and 20 settings, we find that while language answers all 22 text probes correctly with respect to the true environment, the neutral video is often in disagreement, suggesting that the current unified backbones may not be capable of correct reasoning, internal consistency, and external physical fidelity all at once.

Code world models represent worlds as executable programs, but this representation alone does not determine how to construct a complex world. We introduce Recursive Code World Models (RCWM), a framework for reconstructing complex 3D worlds in code from a single reference image. RCWM couples a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. An RSP represents the executable world as compositional scene code, while each solver call follows the same complete process: establish the whole, recursively reconstruct unresolved parts, and revisit the whole to refine their composition. This global-local-global recursion gives fine-scale structures their own perception-and-editing loops while preserving scene-wide geometry and relationships. Reference-aligned views propagate a shared camera projection across levels, while parent revisitation addresses boundaries, spatial relations, and shared errors that emerge after local refinement. A vision-language coding agent directly compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement, recursive descent, and return. Across complex scenes, RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods. Ablation studies further support the benefits of recursive construction and suggest that deeper calls can improve finer-scale reconstruction. RCWM provides a recursive construction principle for building complex executable worlds from visual evidence.

Autoregressive video world models enable interactive, long-horizon exploration, but flexible control remains challenging. Exploring a source video from new viewpoints requires the generated rollout to remain synchronised with the recorded event, place observed content in the requested view, plausibly complete newly exposed regions, and recover previously generated appearance on revisits. Existing methods typically address these requirements through task-specific modules or additional training. We present World in World, a training-free inference-time interface that converts heterogeneous control evidence into camera- and time-labelled clean visual states, which are read through the native self attention of a frozen causal video model. The evidence comprises source-video observations, target-view scene projections, geometry renderings that guide completion of newly exposed subject regions, and retrieved generated states beyond the rolling cache. Each evidence source carries token-level support and its own availability schedule. A correspondence router combines persistent point identities with geometry to establish token correspondences, guiding supported queries towards matching source-video tokens. Evidence-wise attention CFG (EWA) then independently regulates each auxiliary channel's additional contribution using attention responses from the same denoising forward pass. The shared interface supports camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and human-motion transfer with the same frozen backbone. We evaluate World in World on camera-controlled video rerendering under diverse viewpoint changes, assessing perceptual quality, temporal consistency, and camera-following accuracy.

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

Mainstream robotic policies often adopt a Markovian formulation, but many complex real-world manipulation tasks are inherently non-Markovian, requiring long-horizon memory beyond the current observation. Existing memory mechanisms often rely on language summaries, growing visual windows, or their combinations, and may therefore lose fine-grained visual evidence or face a trade-off between history coverage and execution efficiency. We introduce MaP-WAM, a Memory-as-Plans framework that decomposes memory-dependent world-action modeling into memory-grounded planning and plan-conditioned execution, and uses long-term multimodal episodic context as planning-time evidence rather than repeatedly conditioning the executor on the full history. MaP-WAM represents memory as completed segment records containing language instructions and sparse visual context, and converts this episodic memory into compact plans comprising the next segment-level language plan and corresponding visual guidance. A World-Action-Progress (WAP) model executes each plan over an unknown duration by jointly predicting action chunks and corresponding execution progress at inference time, calibrating predicted progress through plan-observation alignment for adaptive segment transitions and closed-loop context updates. MaP-WAM keeps the executor context length fixed, while structured attention further enables key-value caching in both planning and execution. MaP-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on RMBench with an 83.3% success rate and attains 78.0% success on real-robot tasks, while maintaining approximately constant executor inference latency as task history grows.

Reliable robot deployment requires online failure monitoring, yet existing monitors mainly derive risk from proxy signals or train dedicated monitoring components. We ask whether the internal predictive states of a frozen pretrained robotic world model already contain directly decodable failure information. Failure-Aware Readout from World Models (FARM) trains only a 33,985-parameter supervised readout over frozen VLA-JEPA predictive states, producing step-wise failure scores and causal trajectory risk. Five-fold out-of-fold evaluation across seven source tasks reaches 85.68/88.59 pooled AUROC/AUPRC, and FARM gives the best Seen performance among 15 matched baselines on the 10-task benchmark. Across four real-robot populations on PIPER X, SO-101, and Franka, fixed-readout transfer and readout-only adaptation test deployment shifts without updating the predictive backbone. FARM also discriminates failures from partial causal histories and adds 0.2256 ms mean CUDA latency once the frozen state is available. These results support frozen predictive world-model states as reusable features for causal, transferable, and low-overhead execution monitoring.

World models let agents plan by predicting the consequences of their actions, but changes in the environment can make them inaccurate. We study the problem of adapting a world model to an unknown test-time environment, drawn from a known environment family, using only a few episodes of interaction. Existing approaches trade off computational cost against expressivity, i.e., the range of models a method can produce. For example, in-context learning is computationally cheap but limited in expressivity, and gradient-based adaptation is expressive but computationally expensive. We present CLAW (Context-conditioned Low-rank Adaptation of World models), which addresses this tradeoff by using a hypernetwork to generate low-rank (LoRA) adapters at test time. During pretraining, we simulate adaptation to a variety of environments and jointly train the hypernetwork and base world model. At test time, we freeze the base model and use a forward pass of the hypernetwork to generate adapters from a small batch of test-time transitions. We evaluate CLAW in locomotion and manipulation environment families that vary in dynamics, embodiment, and reward. We show that, using only seconds of test-time data, CLAW outperforms gradient-based adaptation and in-context learning during online adaptation. We also show that CLAW avoids overfitting in data-scarce regimes, that its advantage comes from the expressive adapters rather than context conditioning, and that pretraining the hypernetwork jointly with the base model outperforms training it post hoc.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World-Action Models (WAMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their generated actions may violate hard physical constraints and therefore be unsafe or infeasible for deployment. Existing safety approaches either optimize statistical safety objectives without deterministic per-step guarantees or correct unsafe actions only during inference, creating a mismatch between policy training and execution. We introduce ActSafeGuard, a differentiable and training-aligned safeguard layer for flow-matching based policies. ActSafeGuard integrates hard action feasibility into policy learning, not merely treating safety as an inference-time external component. Through an analytical ray-scaling operator design, ActSafeGuard enables boundary-aware gradients to guide the model to naturally learn constrained manifolds. Extensive experiments on multiple standard foundation backbones ($π_{0.5}$ and Fast-WAM) across various tasks demonstrate that ActSafeGuard consistently achieves a $100\%$ step safety rate while fully preserving or even boosting task success rates, providing a scalable and minimally invasive solution for safe embodied AI deployment.

Recent video world models generate increasingly realistic and interactive visual experiences, yet lack reliable mechanisms for maintaining persistent world state and enforcing programmable rules over extended interactions. We introduce Programmable World Model, a framework that decouples world-state evolution from visual observation generation. An agent translates natural-language instructions into executable programs that specify entity states and state-transition rules, enabling direct control over individual entities and their interactions. A lightweight engine executes these programs to update and maintain an explicit, persistent global world state, including off-screen entities and non-visual attributes. To connect world state with visual generation, we introduce state-augmented 3D oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) as an intermediate representation. This representation, together with the target camera trajectory, is deterministically compiled into pixel-aligned spatiotemporal conditioning signals for a pretrained video model serving as the generative renderer. This design allows users to create playable games with predefined mechanics, direct control over individual entities, and persistent world state throughout gameplay. We further introduce CombatStateBench, a benchmark for evaluating programmable world models. On CombatStateBench, our method achieves 94% Count Accuracy and 98% State Accuracy, substantially outperforming existing interactive video world models while supporting coherent long-horizon generation. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of separating explicit state evolution from generative rendering for building persistent, programmable worlds.

Action-conditioned latent world models predict future visual representations, enabling zero-shot goal-conditioned robot planning and control. However, their predictions for fine-grained spatial and rotational actions are unreliable for full 7-DoF end-effector control. To address this gap, we introduce DUET-DINO, a simultaneous cross-view latent world model that jointly learns action-conditioned predictions from static side- and wrist-camera observations through cross-view conditioning. By exploiting complementary global scene and gripper-centric information, DUET-DINO enables latent planning over the full 7-DoF action space. Across spatially diverse reach, orientation-intensive angled-reach, and multi-goal grasp-and-lift tasks, DUET-DINO consistently outperforms single-view and independent dual-view baselines, achieving 92% success on reach, 72.5% on angled-reach, and 60.0% on lift tasks. DUET-DINO is trained from scratch on DROID and RoboArena datasets and generalizes robustly under visual distribution shifts. We further show that while V-JEPA 2 wrist-view predictions underestimate visual dynamics induced by fine-grained actions, DINOv3 predictions better capture action-conditioned scene changes, leading to stronger downstream planning. The code and model checkpoints will be open-sourced. Project page: https://utn-air.github.io/DUET-DINO

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models learn a compact latent representation of the world that supports prediction and planning, but their capability to learn physics and generate physically realistic dynamics remains hitherto untested. In this work, we introduce SemiGroup-JEPA (SG-JEPA), which extends the LeWorldModel framework by supplying the parameter governing the physics to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through an autoregressive latent rollout. To evaluate the model's ability to generalize out of distribution, we design dynamical tasks under different gravitational fields that, despite obeying the same physical law, exhibit qualitatively different dynamics, ranging from floating motion in weak gravitational fields to rapid bouncing in strong ones. In contrast to DINO-WM, SG-JEPA reduces open-loop prediction error by up to 2 times on two-dimensional datasets, and increases control success rate up to 2.5 times for three-dimensional robotic datasets, for which we train independent diffusion policies. To explain this advantage, we develop a linear feature model that separates local law-conditioned error from its recursive amplification under rollout. Guided by this model, we find that back-propagating the multi-step rollout loss into the representation trains the encoder to keep the features that the predictor can carry forward, and that those are the features the dynamics depend on, so most of the gain comes from the encoder learning better features rather than from the predictor learning better dynamics. See project page at https://sg-jepa.github.io.

Embodied AI, including vision-language-action and world-action models, must operate reliably in the physical world. Yet methods that perform well in simulation can degrade substantially on real robots, especially in long-horizon deformable-object manipulation, where policies must track changing states and execute reliable multi-stage bimanual interactions. Existing real-robot benchmarks mainly focus on short-horizon rigid-object tasks and offer limited coverage of long-horizon deformable manipulation. We introduce FolDeX, a physical-world benchmark built entirely from real-robot data, with garment folding as its primary task. Since real-robot data collection is costly, FolDeX studies how heterogeneous physical experience can be reused efficiently. The benchmark is organized around four research axes: leveraging human intervention and recovery data collected during deployment; transferring data across tasks, including across garment categories and from rigid to deformable-object manipulation; reusing data across scenes with changes in lighting, background, and layout; and transferring data across robotic embodiments. FolDeX provides 2,000+ hours of real-robot data spanning 20+ tasks and 10+ embodiments. We also establish a fair real-robot evaluation platform for externally submitted policies, with standardized tasks, held-out physical objects, controlled initializations, and a unified execution protocol. The platform is publicly accessible at https://ai.midea.com/#/fold-challenge. We hope FolDeX will serve as a unified testbed for heterogeneous real-robot data reuse and reliable long-horizon deformable manipulation.

Learning-based motion planners pay at training what classical planners pay per query. Trained in world coordinates, they relearn the same motion at every position and orientation. Existing work restores the missing rigid-body equivariance in the training data, in the inference operator, or in the weights, and each carries a cost. We ask how much of that equivariance the planning query supplies for free. A start s and a goal g determine a frame in closed form, with origin at their midpoint and first axis along g-s. Expressing trajectory and obstacles in that frame removes three translations and two rotations of SE(3), at initialisation, for one cross product per query and with no constraint on the architecture. A single rotation about the start-goal axis remains, and no continuous rule removes it. On a cluttered 3D benchmark, holding architecture, data and budget fixed, the frame raises the held-out collision-free rate from 14.60% to 51.10%, where a straight segment from start to goal scores 15.6% and the world-frame model does not beat it. We build all three mechanisms for the residual rotation and each is worth under a point, though the equivariant backbone reaches any given level two to three times sooner. What the representation supplies therefore dominates what any mechanism enforces, and the standard diagnostic does not see the difference: two models with indistinguishable non-equivariance residuals differ by 28 points. Calibrated against a non-symmetry intervention, the frame is not even the largest effect available, since local geometry is worth +40.0 where the frame is worth +36.5.

Real-time MRI (rtMRI) captures the dynamics of the entire vocal tract during speech, but labeled data are scarce and the modality - single-slice, grayscale, low-resolution - differs substantially from the natural videos that video foundation models are trained on. We introduce Arti-JEPA, a joint embedding predictive architecture to model vocal tract rtMRI by continuing its self-supervised objective on about 62h of unlabelled vocal-tract videos, and evaluate the frozen representation on three tasks: cross-domain phoneme prediction (on typical speakers), fluent-vs-disfluent classification (a corpus containing stuttered speech), and characterizing pre/post-operative transfer (after partial glossectomy). Three key findings emerge. (1) A temporal video prior decisively outperforms per-frame image encoders, and latent prediction (V-JEPA) is at least as strong as pixel reconstruction (VideoMAE), with the edge on fine-grained phonemes. (2) Domain adaptation is \emph{task-dependent}: it roughly doubles cross-domain phoneme prediction $κ$ (to 0.352) but does not help binary stuttering classification. (3) Arti-JEPA was able to recover phoneme signal from pre/post glossectomy speech --- an in-domain probe decodes patients at least as well as a typical speaker, indicating that the residual transfer gap is cross-speaker/domain misalignment, not surgical signal loss, and post-operative decoding does not fall below performance on pre-operative speech. Together, these position a frozen, domain-adapted rtMRI encoder as a reusable measurement tool for articulatory and clinical speech science.

World Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive world modeling with action generation, allowing anticipated future states to guide agent behavior. Although WAMs are rapidly advancing embodied AI, general-purpose counterparts remain largely unexplored in games. Existing game-oriented approaches often combine action-conditioned world models with external policies and reward functions to realize WAM-like decision-making, yet they operate mainly in 2D visual observation space and do not instantiate persistent 3D geometry. Extending this paradigm to 3D games introduces a distinct challenge. In autonomous driving and robotics, the physical environment exists independently of the model, providing a persistent 3D world in which selected actions can be executed. Games have no such external substrate; the virtual world itself must be instantiated. Most playable games require a persistent and navigable space, while 3D games additionally require explicit geometry that supports movement and interaction. Action-conditioned video rollouts provide visual observations but not this spatial representation. We present \textsc{Valerant}, a training-free framework that transforms a pretrained action-conditioned world model into a WAM for exploring and constructing 3D game maps. By coupling predictive visual rollouts with SLAM-based spatial reconstruction and exploration-driven action selection, \textsc{Valerant} progressively transforms a single image into a persistent 3D game map. This framework extends WAM-based interaction beyond 2D visual simulation and offers a new approach to reducing manual effort in 3D game-map creation.

World models are increasingly used as policy-in-the-loop imagination environments, where reliable rollouts require fine-grained controllability with respect to low-level robot actions. A key obstacle to scaling such models in robotics is that actions are not a universal language in pixel space: changes in visual environment, camera view, robot placement, or embodiment alter how the same numerical action manifests visually, leading to conflicting supervision under mixed training and brittle generalization at deployment. We introduce SyncWorld, an action-conditioned world model that serves as a zero-shot simulator across unseen environments without any additional training. SyncWorld leverages a visual calibration episode---paired frames and actions that showcase all the controllable degrees of freedom---to specify the setup-specific Action--Visual Mapping in context. Training with visual calibration contexts teaches the model to interpret actions through visual evidence and to leverage interaction history when explicit calibration is unavailable. Experiments show that SyncWorld can accurately simulate action outcomes in previously unseen settings, and that its capability of simulating rollouts enables test-time policy improvement without training.