mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning Robot Manipulation from Audio World Models

arXiv 2512.08405 ↗First posted 9 Dec 2025cs.ROcited by 2

On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models

Abstract (arXiv)

World models have demonstrated impressive performance on robotic learning tasks. Many such tasks inherently demand multimodal reasoning; for example, filling a bottle with water will lead to visual information alone being ambiguous or incomplete, thereby requiring reasoning over the temporal evolution of audio, accounting for its underlying physical properties and pitch patterns. In this paper, we propose a generative latent flow matching model to anticipate future audio observations, enabling the system to reason about long-term consequences when integrated into a robot policy. We demonstrate the superior capabilities of our system through two manipulation tasks that require perceiving in-the-wild audio or music signals, compared to methods without future lookahead. We further emphasize that successful robot action learning for these tasks relies not merely on multi-modal input, but critically on the accurate prediction of future audio states that embody intrinsic rhythmic patterns.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 9 of its 14 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

Builds on

9 of 14 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
  2. 2025FLARE: Robot Learning with Implicit World Modeling21 May
  3. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr

Other references · 6

  1. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  2. 2025Video Generators are Robot Policiescited by 86
  3. 2024Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matchingcited by 54
  4. 2024FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portraitcited by 40
  5. 2023RoboPianist: Dexterous Piano Playing with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
  6. 2024ManiWAV: Learning Robot Manipulation from In-the-Wild Audio-Visual Datacited by 29

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Information
  2. 2025Audio-VLA: Adding Contact Audio Perception to Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
  3. 2026LLM-Powered Interactive Robotic Action Synthesis from Multimodal Speech, Gestures, and Music
  4. 2026Towards the Vision-Sound-Language-Action Paradigm: The HEAR Framework for Sound-Centric Manipulation
  5. 2022Play it by Ear: Learning Skills amidst Occlusion through Audio-Visual Imitation Learning
  6. 2026Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation
  7. 2026CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation
  8. 2025FlowRAM: Grounding Flow Matching Policy with Region-Aware Mamba Framework for Robotic Manipulation