mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Act2Goal: From World Model To General Goal-conditioned Policy

arXiv 2512.23541 ↗First posted 29 Dec 2025cs.RO cs.AIcited by 18

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Specifying robotic manipulation tasks in a manner that is both expressive and precise remains a central challenge. While visual goals provide a compact and unambiguous task specification, existing goal-conditioned policies often struggle with long-horizon manipulation due to their reliance on single-step action prediction without explicit modeling of task progress. We propose Act2Goal, a general goal-conditioned manipulation policy that integrates a goal-conditioned visual world model with multi-scale temporal control. Given a current observation and a target visual goal, the world model generates a plausible sequence of intermediate visual states that captures long-horizon structure. To translate this visual plan into robust execution, we introduce Multi-Scale Temporal Hashing (MSTH), which decomposes the imagined trajectory into dense proximal frames for fine-grained closed-loop control and sparse distal frames that anchor global task consistency. The policy couples these representations with motor control through end-to-end cross-attention, enabling coherent long-horizon behavior while remaining reactive to local disturbances. Act2Goal achieves strong zero-shot generalization to novel objects, spatial layouts, and environments. We further enable reward-free online adaptation through hindsight goal relabeling with LoRA-based finetuning, allowing rapid autonomous improvement without external supervision. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that Act2Goal improves success rates from 30% to 90% on challenging out-of-distribution tasks within minutes of autonomous interaction, validating that goal-conditioned world models with multi-scale temporal control provide structured guidance necessary for robust long-horizon manipulation. Project page: https://act2goal.github.io/

Key facts. Cited by 18 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 43 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2025.

Builds on

43 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation11 Oct
  2. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  3. 2025EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation3 Jan
  4. 2024Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation19 Dec
  5. 2023Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models16 Oct
  6. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 37

  1. 2023Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Trainingcited by 3,048
  2. 2019Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imaginationcited by 1,598
  3. 2018World Modelscited by 1,444
  4. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,193
  5. 2017Hindsight Experience Replaycited by 1,096
  6. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 867
  7. 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 833
  8. 2024LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusioncited by 549
  9. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 477
  10. 2024Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Modelscited by 467
  11. 2025AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systemscited by 390
  12. 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 279
25 more
  1. 2018HG-DAgger: Interactive Imitation Learning with Human Expertscited by 245
  2. 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policiescited by 229
  3. 2023MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Playcited by 214
  4. 2023Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learningcited by 207
  5. 2019Goal-conditioned Imitation Learningcited by 159
  6. 2024Precise and Dexterous Robotic Manipulation via Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learningcited by 153
  7. 2022Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: Problems and Solutionscited by 145
  8. 2025Genie Envisioner: A Unified World Foundation Platform for Robotic Manipulationcited by 129
  9. 2024Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 116
  10. 2025Video Generators are Robot Policiescited by 86
  11. 2024VidMan: Exploiting Implicit Dynamics from Video Diffusion Model for Effective Robot Manipulationcited by 45
  12. 2025EnerVerse-AC: Envisioning Embodied Environments with Action Conditioncited by 40
  13. 2022Goal-conditioned dual-action imitation learning for dexterous dual-arm robot manipulationcited by 21
  14. 2025Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Gamescited by 20
  15. 2025RICL: Adding In-Context Adaptability to Pre-Trained Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 19
  16. 2025MimicDroid: In-Context Learning for Humanoid Robot Manipulation from Human Play Videoscited by 17
  17. 2025Chain-of-Action: Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling for Robotic Manipulationcited by 16
  18. 2021MHER: Model-based Hindsight Experience Replaycited by 14
  19. 2024Goals as Reward-Producing Programscited by 14
  20. 2025Object-centric 3D Motion Field for Robot Learning from Human Videoscited by 13
  21. 2025High-Fidelity Simulated Data Generation for Real-World Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation Learning with Gaussian Splattingcited by 12
  22. 2022Relay Hindsight Experience Replay: Self-Guided Continual Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Object Manipulation Tasks with Sparse Rewardscited by 10
  23. 2022USHER: Unbiased Sampling for Hindsight Experience Replaycited by 6
  24. 2023GO-DICE: Goal-Conditioned Option-Aware Offline Imitation Learning via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimationcited by 6
  25. 2025Hyper-GoalNet: Goal-Conditioned Manipulation Policy Learning with HyperNetworkscited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 18.

18 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?cited by 311
  2. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Controlcited by 289
  3. 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AIcited by 46
  4. 2026Native Video-Action Pretraining for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 30
  5. 2026PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulationcited by 20
  6. 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulationcited by 17
  7. 2026MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Modelscited by 15
  8. 2026WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Jointscited by 14
  9. 2026HarmoWAM: Harmonizing Generalizable and Precise Manipulation via Adaptive World Action Modelscited by 10
  10. 2026World Action Models: A Surveycited by 10
  11. 2026LiLa-WAM: Lightweight Latent Reasoning World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 9
  12. 2026Hi-WM: Human-in-the-World-Model for Scalable Robot Post-Trainingcited by 8
6 more
  1. 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 4
  2. 2026From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulationcited by 2
  3. 2026ω-EVA: Envision, Verify, and Act with Latent Interactive World Modelscited by 2
  4. 2026World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Surveycited by 1
  5. 2026DVG-WM: Disentangled Video Generation Enables Efficient Embodied World Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
  6. 2026Terminal Symmetry as a Carrier of Asymmetric Process Knowledge: Statewise Refinement for Anytime Verified Constructioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Rethinking World-Action Model for Compositional and In-Context Robotic Manipulation
  2. 2026World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
  3. 2026Copper-Policy: Focus on the Representation for Robust Robot Manipulation
  4. 2026MemoryWAM: Efficient World Action Modeling with Persistent Memory
  5. 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2026PACT-WAM: Predicting Actions and Visual Foresight with Compact Temporal Encoding for Robot Manipulation
  7. 2026Scaling World Model for Hierarchical Manipulation Policies
  8. 2026ChainVLA: Chaining Vision-Language-Action Queries through a Unified Execution State for Long-Horizon Manipulation