World Models for VLA Models

VLA: Vision-Language-Action

Latest papers

28 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

LAW: Unifying Language, Action, and World Modeling for Agentic Physical Intelligence
Oct 16, 2026Jiajun Cao, Kai Tang, Bohua Zhang +17Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation World Models for VLA Models
State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics
What Matters for World Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models?
Oct 14, 2026Qisen Ma, Yixiang Chen, Yuan Xu +10World Models for VLA Models Temporal Modeling for VLA Models
New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Alibaba Group +1
ForkCast: Predictive Recovery for Vision-Language-Action Policies via Counterfactual Futures
Oct 13, 2026Chenru Wen, Huajian Zeng, Haokai Ding +5World Models for VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE. · Virginia Tech, USA.
World-Calibrated Proposal-to-Action Flow for Vision-Language-Action Models
Oct 1, 2026Jie He, Wei Li, Junwen Tong +3World Models for VLA Models Flow-Based VLA Models
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia Technology, ZTE, China · Sun Yat-sen University
Token-World: World Modeling in Vision-Language Model Token Space for Robot Manipulation
Sep 30, 2026Chuyao Fu, Xiaowei Chi, Yuhan Rui +14World Models Action-Conditioned World Models
Southern University of Science and Technology · MUKA Robotics · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +3
WM-VLM: Probing Internal World Models for Interleaved Visual-Textual Reasoning
Sep 28, 2026Yuheng Zha, Yilei Wang, Qiyue Gao +5World Model Learning 3D Spatial Reasoning
UC San Diego · Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI · Carnegie Mellon University
WorldGuide: Learning Success-Failure Boundaries in Latent World Models for Vision-Language-Action Policies
Sep 28, 2026Lin Liu, Lu Zhang, Ziying Song +6Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models
School of Information and Communication Engineering Dalian University of Technology & Beta Infinity · School of Information and Communication, Engineering Dalian University of Technology · Nanyang Technological University +1
SLIP-VLA: Single-Step Latent Imagination for Policy Learning in Vision-Language-Action Models
Sep 27, 2026Tianfu Li, Haoxuan Xu, Wenbo Chen +7World Model Learning Visuomotor Policy Learning
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. · Nanyang Technological University. +1
Devol-ONE: One Autoregressive Mixture of Transformers to Unify Vision-Language-Action and Latent World Modeling
Sep 26, 2026Hongyi Cai, Yi Herng Ong, Tingshiuan C. Wu +4Mixture-of-Transformers Robotic Manipulation
Devol Robots, San Francisco, CA, United States
Towards VLA-Dreamer: Refining VLA Behavior Using World Models
Sep 25, 2026Parsa Mastouri Kashani, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Stefan WermterWorld Models for VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models
Knowledge Technology, Dept. of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Germany
Think Like a World Model, Act Like a VLA: Distilling World-Model Representations into Compact Robot Policies
Sep 21, 2026Trung Dao, Sankalp Yamsani, Jaden Park +2World Models Robotic Manipulation
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.
WISE: World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models
Sep 3, 2026Chenhao Zhang, Hanyu Zhao, Hang Cheng +2Robustness of VLA Models World Models for Robotics
1Tsinghua University · 2Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)
AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies
Aug 15, 2026An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li +3World Models for VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
World Tokens: Enhancing Embodied Policies with Training-Time World Modeling
Aug 10, 2026Qu Tang, Benhui Zhuang, Bo Yuan +3Efficient VLA Model Inference Efficient VLA Models
JIUTIAN Research · Zhongguancun Academy
GWM-VLA: Geometry-Aware Latent World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Learning
Aug 7, 2026Yanping Zhao, Hang Yu, Yiwei Wang +8World Model Learning Robotic Manipulation
Tongji University
WCM: A World Critic Model for Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Learning
Jul 31, 2026Senyu Fei, Xiaopeng Yu, Siyin Wang +3World Model Learning Vision-Language-Action Models
1Tongji University · 3Fudan University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute
World Action Planner: Generalizable Decision-Making with Action-Conditioned World Models
Jul 30, 2026Xiangcheng Zhang, Yilun DuWorld Models for Robotics World Model-Based Planning
Harvard University
WorldBagel: Uncovering the Power of Unified Multimodal Models for Vision-Language-Action-World Modeling
Jul 3, 2026Zelin Zhao, Min Shi, Bo Yuan +5World Models for Robotics Unified Multimodal Models
Georgia Institute of Technology
FutureNav: Unified World-Action Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Jun 29, 2026Lingfeng Zhang, Zeying Gong, Xiaoshuai Hao +7World Models Vision-Language Navigation
Tsinghua University · Pengcheng Laboratory · Xiaomi EV +2
World Pilot: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models with World-Action Priors
Jun 10, 2026Zefu Lin, Rongxu Cui, Junjia Xu +4Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation World Models for Robotics
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) · Nanjing University · Beihang University
World-Language-Action Model for Unified World Modeling, Language Reasoning, and Action Synthesis
Jun 4, 2026Yi Yang, Zhihong Liu, Siqi Kou +9World Models for Robotics Robot Foundation Models
SJTU · SII · HUST +4
World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI
May 12, 2026Siyin Wang, Junhao Shi, Zhaoyang Fu +11Vision-Language-Action Models World Action Models
1Fudan University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute · 3National University of Singapore
One Token Per Frame: Reconsidering Visual Bandwidth in World Models for VLA Policy
May 8, 2026Zuojin Tang, Shengchao Yuan, Xiaoxin Bai +4Visual Token Compression Efficient VLA Models
Zhejiang University · Central South University · Harbin Institute of Technology +2
Grounded World Model: Latent Planning with Language Goals
Apr 13, 2026Quanyi Li, Lan Feng, Haonan Zhang +4Language-Conditioned Robot Planning World Models for Robotics
EPFL · NUS
Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
Mar 21, 2026Zhilong Zhang, Haoxiang Ren, Yihao Sun +6RL for VLMs Vision-Language-Action Models
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · Mila - Quebec AI Institute +1
AcceRL: A Distributed Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning and World Model Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models
Mar 19, 2026Chengxuan Lu, Shukuan Wang, Yanjie Li +10World Models for VLA Models Asynchronous RL
IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY Wolf 1069 b Lab, Sany Group
World2Act: Latent Action Post-Training from World Model Dynamics
Mar 11, 2026An Dinh Vuong, Tuan Van Vo, Abdullah Sohail +6Vision-Language-Action Models World Models for VLA Models
MBZUAI
Pri4R: Learning World Dynamics for Vision-Language-Action Models with Privileged 4D Representation
Mar 2, 2026Jisoo Kim, Jungbin Cho, Sanghyeok Chu +9World Models for VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models
KAIST AI · LG AI Research · Yonsei University +2

Oct 16, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

LAW: Unifying Language, Action, and World Modeling for Agentic Physical Intelligence

Jiajun Cao, Kai Tang, Bohua Zhang, Zezhong Qian+16

State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation World Models for VLA Models Reasoning for VLA Models World Action Models

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World-action models jointly predict actions and future world states, but long-horizon manipulation further requires language reasoning to plan subtask objectives, assess execution progress, and guide action selection. We present LAW, a closed-loop VLM--WAM framework that unifies language reasoning, action generation, and world modeling through semantic subtask progress. Within the LAW agent, a hybrid-expert vision-language model plans the remaining subtasks, estimates the values of and fuses actions proposed by a world-action model, and asynchronously assesses execution status to support continued execution and subtask transitions. Within the world-action model, Mixture-of-Transformer Experts integrates modality-specific and shared computation for joint video--action modeling. Dual-stream hierarchical visual memory maintains temporal context for both models, while subtask-local value learning aligns action evaluation with semantic objectives and preserves supervision from successful prefixes of failed trajectories. LAW achieves 94.21% average success across 50 RoboTwin tasks. Replacing the WAM backbone with OpenWAM-

alpha

further raises the average success rate to 95.56%, establishing a new open-source state of the art on RoboTwin. Despite having only 2B parameters, our VLM also outperforms variants using Embodied-R1.5 and GPT-5.5 High. On three long-horizon real-robot tasks, LAW achieves 65% average success, compared with 28.33% for

pi_{0.5}

and 25% for Fast-WAM.