mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Say, Dream, and Act: Learning Video World Models for Instruction-Driven Robot Manipulation

arXiv 2602.10717 ↗First posted 11 Feb 2026cs.ROcited by 7

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation requires anticipating how the environment evolves in response to actions, yet most existing systems lack this predictive capability, often resulting in errors and inefficiency. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide high-level guidance, they cannot explicitly forecast future states, and existing world models either predict only short horizons or produce spatially inconsistent frames. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for fast and predictive video-conditioned action. Our approach first selects and adapts a robust video generation model to ensure reliable future predictions, then applies adversarial distillation for fast, few-step video generation, and finally trains an action model that leverages both generated videos and real observations to correct spatial errors. Extensive experiments show that our method produces temporally coherent, spatially accurate video predictions that directly support precise manipulation, achieving significant improvements in embodiment consistency, spatial referring ability, and task completion over existing baselines. Codes & Models will be released.

Key facts. Cited by 7 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 20 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

Builds on

20 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  2. 2025FLARE: Robot Learning with Implicit World Modeling21 May
  3. 2025DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models19 May
  4. 2025LaDi-WM: A Latent Diffusion-based World Model for Predictive Manipulation13 May
  5. 2024RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination18 Apr
  6. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 14

  1. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
  2. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  3. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,526
  4. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  5. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
  6. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
  7. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 507
  8. 2023Learning Interactive Real-World Simulatorscited by 440
  9. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 440
  10. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 386
  11. 2024Fast High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Adversarial Diffusion Distillationcited by 276
  12. 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 203
2 more
  1. 2025DexVLA: Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for General Robot Controlcited by 191
  2. 20254D-VLA: Spatiotemporal Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Cross-Scene Calibrationcited by 55

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
  2. 2026World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
  3. 2026DreamX-Phi 1.0: Action-Conditioned Video World Model for Robotic Manipulation
  4. 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
  5. 2025VideoVLA: Video Generators Can Be Generalizable Robot Manipulators
  6. 2026From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data
  7. 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation
  8. 2026SWEET: Sparse World Modeling with Image Editing for Embodied Task Execution