Active vision manipulation requires a policy to control both its camera and its end-effectors, yet camera motion determines which evidence remains visible within finite observation windows. Acquiring a new view can displace task-critical cues, while retaining a view forgoes potentially useful observations. We formulate this as an evidence-aware retain--acquire problem and present ActiveWAM, a unified world--action model that learns observation and manipulation jointly. To this end, we propose training-time inversion which constrains a frozen video prior by task-bearing source evidence and visible temporal changes, eliminating the need for test-time inversion or candidate ranking. At deployment, the policy generates bimanual and pan/tilt actions-including stay and reacquisition behaviors-from view-aware history, and updates context from newly measured RGB observations. Future-video prediction serves as a co-training signal, while action generation requires neither future-video decoding nor optimal viewpoint annotations. We introduce RoboTwin-AV, a 50-task benchmark with executable pan/tilt control and automatically generated demonstrations. ActiveWAM improves TAVIS out-of-distribution success by up to 17.0 percentage points over the strongest baselines, achieves 20.0 additional points over Fast-WAM on RoboTwin-AV, and outperforms it by 26.7 points on real-world physical kitchen tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01698
Generation-free world action models (WAMs) retain future-video prediction during training but act from internal video features at inference, leaving unclear what these features should preserve for control. Our representation diagnostics show that representations with more predictable future changes need not make linear action decoding easier. Observed future changes provide additional action information beyond the present, and linearly readable action information is spatially concentrated. These findings motivate Action-Relevant Predictive States (ARPS), a compact predictive interface between the video and action experts. ARPS uses a horizon-conditioned state predictor to aggregate intermediate video features into a compact state that supplies all visual context to the action expert. Future-representation supervision trains different parts of this state to predict visual representations at different future times, together with their changes relative to the present. At inference, the supervision branch is removed, and the action expert only uses the learned predictive state computed from current observations. Controlled ablations show that future supervision substantially improves generalization under distribution shift. ARPS achieves 99.2% success on LIBERO and transfers to LIBERO-Plus without adaptation, reaching 87.3% and exceeding Fast-WAM by 39.2 percentage points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23369
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23184
Fast-WAM shows that video-action co-training improves control without generating future video at inference, making the representation from a single video diffusion Transformer forward central to action generation. However, future-observation prediction does not explicitly prioritize the future dynamics and visual structure needed for control. We present MT-WAM, which retains the original training objectives and adds complementary supervision for future two-dimensional point trajectories and visual features. A lightweight dual-stream branch copied from the video backbone's final blocks provides target-specific processing, while a structured attention mask prevents cross-stream attention. Motion-stream tokens supply additional dynamics conditions to the action expert. Future visual-feature prediction provides supervision in a feature space that captures object and spatial structure. This supervision trains the video backbone to provide more informative visual context for action generation under changing visual conditions, without adding visual-feature-stream tokens to action conditioning. At inference, MT-WAM uses video and motion caches computed once per replan and skips future-video prediction. Without additional embodied policy pretraining, MT-WAM achieves 98.2% success on LIBERO and 73.7% on LIBERO-Plus, exceeding Fast-WAM by 23.8 percentage points on the latter. On RoboTwin 2.0 Clean2Rand, Random success increases from 6.30% to 19.40%; across four real-world tasks, average success increases from 67.0% to 77.8%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21474
Modeling physical dynamics, including how objects move, interact, and change state, is central to video world models for embodied AI. We present StrucPhysVideo, a family of video world models that bridges physics-focused data curation with language- and action-conditioned prediction of scene evolution. Our data pipeline combines motion-aware video segmentation, quality and content filtering, and physical relevance verification with structured annotations of objects, materials, and temporally localized interactions. By disentangling camera motion from object behavior and explicitly describing contact, deformation, and state transitions, the pipeline provides supervision grounded in observable physical events. Building on these data, we introduce StrucPhysVideo-TI2V, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) text-image-to-video model trained with a curriculum that progressively emphasizes physical dynamics while retaining general-domain video data. StrucPhysVideo-TI2V achieves state-of-the-art performance on Physics-IQ Verified, scoring 45.5% and outperforming Cosmos3-Super-Image2Video by 2.8 percentage points. Caption ablations across backbones further demonstrate the effectiveness of physics-focused supervision. We further extend StrucPhysVideo-TI2V to StrucPhysVideo-IA2V, an interactive image-action-to-video world model that predicts visual outcomes from robot end-effector commands. Action conditioning, causal autoregressive generation, and few-step distillation enable incremental robot rollouts with only four denoising steps. Together, StrucPhysVideo advances physical dynamics modeling from image- and language-conditioned video prediction toward action-driven interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18430
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17372
Human videos provide rich manipulation experience, but extracting action representations that preserve useful motion remains challenging. Visual reconstruction alone can entangle manipulation-related motion with appearance changes and camera movement. We present GeoLAM, a framework for learning geometry-grounded latent actions from action-free human videos. GeoLAM combines future-frame reconstruction through a frozen geometric feature hierarchy with motion supervision from a training-only 4D geometry teacher. The geometric representation provides a structural prior, while the teacher's predictions yield spatially pooled targets capturing 3D displacement, residual image-plane motion, and surface-orientation changes. Visibility and confidence weighting reduces the contribution of unreliable estimates, encouraging continuous latent actions to retain geometric motion without explicit hand-pose or hand-trajectory annotations. After video pretraining without action labels, the learned representation provides transition targets for a world-action model trained on action-labeled robot demonstrations. The model jointly denoises latent actions and executable action chunks, with future-video prediction used only as an auxiliary training task. Deployment therefore requires neither the geometry teacher nor future-video generation. Evaluations on a latent-action benchmark and robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate the strong performance of GeoLAM.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17099
World models (WMs) have demonstrated strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by learning predictive representations of future scene dynamics. However, generating future videos during inference introduces substantial computational overhead, leading many recent driving WMs to adopt a single front camera as input for efficient deployment. This design restricts spatial coverage in safety-critical maneuvers such as lane changes, merges, and turns. To address this limitation, we propose SV-WAM, a surround-view world-action model (WAM) that preserves full six-camera observations while maintaining efficient inference. SV-WAM leverages future-video prediction as dense training supervision for action learning within a shared generative model, rather than as an inference-time output. At the core of this design is an action-centered causal mask that prevents action tokens from attending to future-video tokens during joint action-video denoising. Consequently, the video branch can be discarded at deployment, enabling efficient action-only planning. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable drivable-area compliance regularizer that penalizes vehicle-footprint corners approaching or crossing drivable boundaries, improving planning safety and boundary awareness. Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIMv2 benchmark and the open-loop nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that SV-WAM achieves state-of-the-art planning performance with low inference latency and competitive zero-shot transfer capability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03602
Predicting robot videos requires both precise motion reasoning and preservation of high-frequency appearance, yet monolithic pixel models entangle these objectives and often conceal their progress behind a strong last-frame baseline. We present AcrossVAM1.0, a lightweight, text-assisted video action model that factorizes future prediction into object-centric motion and dense appearance. A frozen SAM3-DLP codec decomposes four context frames into semantic particles for the robot, arm, and gripper, together with a background latent. A 0.28M-parameter spatio-temporal Transformer aligns particle identities, rolls their states forward, and is modulated by a frozen OpenCLIP instruction embedding through FiLM. A causal dual-stream decoder combines particle-rendered motion with appearance encoded exclusively from the last observed frame; a residual refiner and learned delivery mask produce five future frames without access to future appearance. On our VRS benchmark constructed from diverse real-robot trajectories, particle dynamics reduce trajectory error by 21.0\% over persistence. Across three delivery-mask seeds, AcrossVAM1.0 improves future-frame PSNR/SSIM from 19.97/0.796 to 20.573/0.8004, while raw particle generation improves motion-region PSNR from 11.89 to 13.23. The delivered model does not yet beat persistence in LPIPS, and correct-versus- shuffled language changes trajectory error by only 2.8--3.1%. We report these limitations alongside oracle, negative-control, multi-seed, and per-robot analyses. The results show that explicit particle dynamics are a promising low-dimensional interface for robot video prediction, while robust language grounding and appearance delivery remain the principal open challenges.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28491
Perceived risk in driving evolves over time and may be supported by specific scene entities, yet supervision is typically limited to coarse video-level judgments. Learning \emph{when} supporting evidence emerges and \emph{which entities} support a risk predictor would ordinarily require costly temporal- and entity-level annotations. We introduce \textbf{CoRE}, a weakly supervised coarse-to-fine framework that learns fine-grained prediction support from coarse video supervision. CoRE first trains a video-level predictor and then freezes it. Structured interventions over candidate temporal regions or entity tracks measure how each candidate changes the coarse prediction, producing graded prediction-effect targets. These targets are distilled into a student that directly predicts temporal and entity support from the original video, without requiring interventions at inference. We evaluate this learning principle across three complementary settings: RISEE tests perceived-risk support from subjective clip-level judgments without temporal or entity-level risk annotations; DoTA provides independent temporal event annotations for evaluating weakly supervised traffic-anomaly localization; and UCF-Crime tests whether the same coarse-to-fine mechanism extends to a standard non-driving anomaly-detection benchmark. Across these settings, CoRE learns informative fine-grained support from coarse supervision, with strong temporal localization on DoTA and competitive performance on UCF-Crime. These results show that coarse video predictions can provide useful supervision for recovering the fine-grained evidence supporting them, without requiring corresponding fine-grained labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25344
Robot actions are inherently embodiment-specific and only weakly aligned with image-space visual changes, limiting their effectiveness as conditioning signals for robot world models. In contrast, visual tracks provide an embodiment-agnostic representation of how task-relevant points move through a scene, offering dense image-space guidance for accurate and spatially precise future video prediction. Building on this observation, we propose TrAct, a world-model-based robot decision-making framework that uses visual tracks as an intermediate interface between control and prediction. TrAct consists of three components: a Vision-Language-Action-and-Track model (VLAT) that jointly predicts candidate actions and corresponding visual tracks from the current observation and language instruction; a track-conditioned world model (TWM) that predicts future visual outcomes conditioned on the proposed tracks; and a vision-language reward model (VLAC) that scores the predicted outcomes. At inference time, VLAT generates candidate action-track pairs, TWM rolls out their visual consequences, and VLAC selects the track whose predicted outcome best satisfies the instruction; the action paired with the selected track is then executed by the robot. Experiments on the proposed LIBERO-INTEGRAL benchmark and real-world Franka manipulation show that TrAct improves success rates from 27% to 55% in simulation and from 49% to 76% on real-world tasks compared with the strong VLA baseline $\pi_{0.5}$. Furthermore, TWM consistently improves video prediction quality over the action-conditioned world model (AWM). These results demonstrate that visual tracks provide an effective shared interface between robot control and visual prediction, enabling more accurate world modeling and stronger robot generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24101
Mobile manipulation requires a robot to predict how locomotion and arm motion jointly alter future observations and control. Existing world-action models, developed largely for fixed-base platforms, do not explicitly distinguish camera ego-motion from base and arm actions. Here we introduce DECOWAM, a whole-body world-action model that separates these factors through dedicated conditional interfaces. DECOWAM freezes an adapted FastWAM backbone and trains residual adapters, an action-equivalent future bottleneck distilled from privileged observations, adversarially separated base and arm latents, and base-velocity conditioning for video prediction. We further introduce ARMDOG, a real-robot dataset that synchronizes video, whole-body state and action, and language. On a fixed replay protocol, DECOWAM improved both future-video and action prediction over FastWAM, reducing action MSE by 21.7% with 25.95M trainable adaptation parameters. Across 79 closed-loop trials per method, it achieved the highest observed whole-body coordination and base-displacement robustness among the compared systems, while task completion remained comparable to the strongest baseline. These results show that embodiment-aware factorization can support parameter-efficient joint visual prediction and whole-body control under moving viewpoints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20114
Latent video generation relies on autoencoders to define a compact space in which generative models operate. Although video autoencoder architectures have evolved substantially, their latent spaces are still optimized primarily for pixel-level reconstruction and provide limited high-level semantic organization. A reconstruction-optimal latent space, however, need not be well suited to generative modeling. We propose V-RAE, a video representation autoencoder that builds compact generative latents on top of frozen vision foundation model representations. A lightweight temporal pooling module removes temporal redundancy while preserving semantic structure, and a video decoder reconstructs continuous motion from the compressed features. We evaluate V-RAE with four representative frozen encoders on video reconstruction, semantic probing, and class-conditional generation. V-RAE achieves 2.13 rFVD on K600, outperforming all evaluated large-scale pretrained video VAEs. Its latents retain substantially more semantic information than conventional video tokenizer latents. Under matched generation settings, our best variant achieves gFVD scores of 117.86 and 19.16 on UCF101 and K600, respectively, while converging up to 6x faster}. We further show that reconstruction quality alone is insufficient to characterize generative utility and introduce tFVD, a temporal-coherence diagnostic that correlates more reliably with downstream generation quality. Beyond video generation, V-RAE also improves future video prediction on Cityscapes over the Wan 2.2 VAE latent space under matched prediction settings. Taken together, the experiments show that frozen semantic representations can support video reconstruction, generation, and predictive modeling. The project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13556
Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact. This is especially limiting in wrist-camera setups: close gripper--object views help observe contact, but a poor approach may already push, miss, slip, or disturb the object before conventional detectors react. We introduce \emph{ContactGuard}, a pre-contact execution monitor for chunked visuomotor policies. Given the policy's planned action chunk, ContactGuard predicts its short-horizon consequence in latent visual space and aborts if the predicted future latent indicates likely failure. Its latent world model is trained from unlabelled robot trajectories to predict compact multi-view visual embeddings under planned actions, avoiding pixel-level video prediction. A lightweight failure probe is then trained from a small labelled set of pre-contact clips. At deployment, ContactGuard anchors prediction before an imminent contact event, rolls the model forward under the policy's own actions, and verifies the predicted post-contact latent. Across real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ContactGuard predicts failure more accurately than direct and corrupted-action ablations, and transfers to live robot as a pre-contact abort signal without modifying the underlying policy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13438
Long-horizon future-frame prediction is important for autonomous driving, traffic surveillance, and intelligent transportation systems, yet remains challenging due to temporal ghosting, geometry drift, and inconsistent object motion. Recent latent video diffusion models have achieved impressive visual quality, but directly applying them to structured traffic scenes often leads to unstable geometry and degraded temporal coherence over extended horizons. We present a training-free inference framework that stabilizes reliable static structure in pretrained video predictions through multi-frame temporal context and view-conditioned routing. For front-camera videos, our method refines generated futures with a multi-frame depth-layered renderer that projects static geometry from observed history frames while preserving dynamic regions from the generative base model. For heterogeneous traffic views, a frozen vision-language model infers a coarse camera group from the observed clip and selects a specialized motion-based predictor. The framework requires neither retraining nor fine-tuning of the underlying video model and can be applied directly to pretrained generators. We validate the proposed framework on the AI City Challenge Track 5 benchmark, where our final system achieves competitive performance among the top-ranked teams. These results demonstrate that geometry-aware inference-time refinement and view-conditioned hybrid inference can improve static-geometry stability and low-level structural fidelity without changing the original model architecture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09493
Building on recent advances in world models, World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model video prediction and action generation. However, they typically represent videos in 2D pixel space, creating a representation gap with 3D space in which robotic actions are executed. Recent 3D approaches introduce 3D information, but fail to fully exploit the dynamics of 3D structures. In this work, we propose 4D-WAM, a model-agnostic training strategy that injects spatiotemporal knowledge from 3D trajectory fields into WAMs through representation alignment. To this end, we introduce two complementary objectives: 1) motion alignment, which aligns temporal feature variations across adjacent frames and encourages the model to build local 4D awareness during training, and 2) destination alignment, which guides the model to infer the final destination from the source frame by minimizing the gap between their attention-like similarity distributions. Together, these objectives provide both local motion supervision and long-horizon goal guidance, enabling WAMs to learn trajectory-level spatiotemporal representations. Extensive in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments across different base models demonstrate the model's improvements in spatial understanding, execution precision, robustness, generalization, and versatility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08023
Generalist robot policies exhibit strong capabilities, but their robustness in complex and unseen environments remains limited. Scaling robot learning and evaluation in diverse real-world environments remains costly and challenging. Action-conditioned world models offer a promising alternative, but they often suffer from limited action controllability and poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To this end, we present GeniWorld, an interactive world model for robots that generalizes robustly across unseen scenarios. Building on pretrained video generative models, we use URDF-based rendering to transform numerical actions into visual action representations, enabling spatially grounded action control. By explicitly decoupling embodiment kinematics from environmental dynamics, our model mitigates scene overfitting and facilitates modeling of robot-environment interactions. To achieve closed-loop control, we construct an autoregressive video prediction model integrated with high-frequency robot kinematic control, enabling interaction with both robot policies and human teleoperators. In our experiments, even when trained solely on limited fixed-scene data, our model achieves superior in-domain performance and robust zero-shot generalization to highly randomized, unseen environments. For downstream applications, GeniWorld serves as a scalable policy evaluator that remains reliable under environmental perturbations. Furthermore, even with limited real-world demonstrations, GeniWorld generates diverse manipulation trajectories within the world model, improving downstream policy performance and robustness in complex environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06332
Estimating physical pressure from vision is essential for understanding contact-rich hand-object interaction. However, prior vision-based pressure estimation methods are largely limited to planar surfaces and single image input, making them difficult to apply to dynamic hand-object interaction with diverse objects. We instead formulate pressure estimation as a hand-centric video prediction problem with monocular video as input. This formulation predicts temporally evolving per-vertex normal pressure and contact directly on the hand mesh, yielding a unified output space independent of object shape and sensor layout. Building on this formulation, we propose \textbf{HOPE}, a framework with two key components. First, we lift tactile-glove pressure, planar-sensor pressure, and distance-based hand-object contact annotations into a shared hand vertex space, allowing bare-hand contact data to regularize pressure learning where metric labels are unavailable. Second, we introduce a vertex-anchored video transformer that treats each vertex as a persistent token, aggregates visual features and hand pose over time, and uses a contact-gated pressure head to enforce that pressure vanishes without contact. Experiments on OpenTouch, PressureVisionDB, and hand-object contact benchmarks validate HOPE across object-pressure, surface-pressure, and contact-supervised HOI settings. Despite using metric pressure supervision primarily from gloved-hand videos, HOPE generalizes to bare-hand egocentric and in-the-wild videos, producing joint contact and pressure predictions beyond the scope of contact-only or planar-pressure baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06192
Action-conditioned world models aim to predict how visual environments evolve under an agent's actions. Yet future frames are often highly predictable from visual inertia and recurring motion patterns alone. This creates a shortcut: models can fit the data by exploiting statistical biases without making their visible dynamics meaningfully depend on the action. As a result, different actions may produce similar futures, while motion may persist even under zero action. The key question is how to reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from dominating action-conditioned prediction. We argue that action control requires more than injecting action features; it requires enforcing consistency under counterfactual changes to actions and observations. Based on this insight, we introduce CoCo, a Counterfactual Consistency framework to enhance action controllability through two complementary constraints. Multi-step counterfactual consistency constrains reference, inverse-action, and zero-action rollouts, while action-spatial counterfactual consistency enforces consistent predictions under mirrored scenes and transformed actions. Together, they reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from substituting for action-dependent dynamics. We further introduce Action Response Consistency (ARC) and Drift Energy (DE) to assess action controllability, together with Mini-SSMB for same-state, multi-action counterfactual evaluation. On Mini-SSMB, our full model achieved ARC_inv of 0.412 and ARC_ref of 0.483, while reducing DE by 17.07% relative to the baseline. On VP2 visual planning, it achieves the highest average success rate among SOTA models, at 73.1%. Experiments on BAIR and RoboNet further show that these gains preserve video prediction quality and transfer across model settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04653
Visual world models typically learn future dynamics from a single observation stream, limiting their ability to model cooperative systems with multiple independently moving observers. We investigate this challenge in Mother--Child endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), where two flexible scopes provide complementary yet role-dependent views without a calibrated stereo relationship. Unlike conventional multi-view fusion that assumes symmetric information exchange, we formulate \textbf{role-asymmetric dual-scope future prediction}, where cross-view evidence is selectively transferred according to the prediction target and its underlying spatial requirements. We propose \textbf{CrossScope}, a dual-stream surgical world model that preserves view-specific experts while enabling target-specific evidence routing through geometry-guided residual interactions. CrossScope learns two complementary communication directions: geometric motion cues from the Mother view guide Child-view future dynamics, while pose-aligned Child appearance supports Mother-view prediction only when valid spatial correspondence is established. This design allows each scope to contribute task-relevant evidence without compromising its view-specific representation. To evaluate this problem, we establish a paired dual-scope benchmark comprising synchronized phantom and real-world ERCP episodes, with evaluations assessing visual fidelity, structural preservation, target localization, and motion consistency. Experiments demonstrate that CrossScope consistently outperforms strong surgical video generation baselines, validating the importance of role-aware evidence routing for multi-observer visual world modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03211