H-WM: Robotic Task and Motion Planning Guided by Hierarchical World Model
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World models are becoming central to robotic planning and control by predicting future state transitions. Existing approaches mainly rely on visual, latent, or language prediction, which can be difficult to ground in executable robot actions and prone to compounding errors over long horizons. In contrast, traditional robotic task and motion planning enables structured long-horizon reasoning through compact symbolic representations of world transitions, but typically lacks synchronized visual prediction. We propose Hierarchical World Model (H-WM), which jointly predicts logical and visual state transitions by combining a high-level logical world model with a low-level visual world model. The predicted logical actions and latent visual state transitions are jointly incorporated into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as intermediate state guidance for long-horizon task execution. Experiments on three long-horizon benchmarks and real robots show that H-WM consistently improves VLA's performance by stabilizing long-horizon execution and mitigating error accumulation. We also construct LIBERO-Logic, a frame-level aligned dataset that pairs visual observations and continuous robot states with logical actions and predicate-based logical states.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 37 of its 78 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.
Builds on
37 of 78 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
- 2025Goal-VLA: Image-Generative VLMs as Object-Centric World Models Empowering Zero-shot Robot Manipulation30 Jun
- 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
- 2025WorldGym: World Model as An Environment for Policy Evaluation31 May
- 2025WorldEval: World Model as Real-World Robot Policies Evaluator25 May
- 2024VisualPredicator: Learning Abstract World Models with Neuro-Symbolic Predicates for Robot Planning30 Oct
- 20243D-VLA: A 3D Vision-Language-Action Generative World Model14 Mar
Other references · 30
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
- 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
- 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
- 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 440
- 2024DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planningcited by 357
- 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 285
- 2024A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AIcited by 274
18 more
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 274
- 2024Navigation World Modelscited by 262
- 2025Hi Robot: Open-Ended Instruction Following with Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 216
- 2023Leveraging Pre-trained Large Language Models to Construct and Utilize World Models for Model-based Task Planningcited by 204
- 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 203
- 2025Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Modelscited by 122
- 2025A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspectivecited by 96
- 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 66
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AIcited by 65
- 2024LLM3:Large Language Model-based Task and Motion Planning with Motion Failure Reasoningcited by 63
- 2025A Survey: Learning Embodied Intelligence from Physical Simulators and World Modelscited by 50
- 2025MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoningcited by 49
- 2025PAN: A World Model for General, Actionable, and Long-Horizon World Simulationcited by 36
- 2025MoManipVLA: Transferring Vision-language-action Models for General Mobile Manipulationcited by 34
- 2025RoboCerebra: A Large-scale Benchmark for Long-horizon Robotic Manipulation Evaluationcited by 31
- 2025LoHoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Long-Horizon Embodied Taskscited by 25
- 2025Critique of World Modelcited by 24
- 2025GraSP-VLA: Graph-based Symbolic Action Representation for Long-Horizon Planning with VLA Policiescited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Studycited by 35
- 2026StageWAM: Joint-Embedding Stage Prediction for World-Action Models in Robot Manipulationcited by 3
- 2026hint2: Hierarchical World Models for Inference-Time Temporal Logic Guidancecited by 1
- 2026Energy-Structured Latent World Models with Neural Time Fields for Physically Constistent Open-World Motion Planningcited by 0
- 2026StageGuard: Learning Stage Transitions for Long-Horizon Robot Tasks via Agentic Distillationcited by 0
- 2026Juno: Taming Predictive Latents for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Juno: Taming Predictive Latents for Vision-Language-Action Models7 Oct 2026
- 2026StageGuard: Learning Stage Transitions for Long-Horizon Robot Tasks via Agentic Distillation17 Sep 2026
- 2026hint2: Hierarchical World Models for Inference-Time Temporal Logic Guidance13 Aug 2026
- 2026StageWAM: Joint-Embedding Stage Prediction for World-Action Models in Robot Manipulation11 Aug 2026
- 2026Energy-Structured Latent World Models with Neural Time Fields for Physically Constistent Open-World Motion Planning10 Aug 2026
- 2026Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study23 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026Rethinking World-Action Model for Compositional and In-Context Robotic Manipulation
- 2026WorldScape Policy 2.0: Empowering Steerable World Action Modeling with Reasoning-Augmented Memory and In-Context Learning
- 2026World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey
- 2026Memory as Plans: World-Action Modeling with Memory-Grounded Planning
- 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026EV-WM: Event-Verified World Models for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
- 2026SG-WAM: Text-Grounded and Spatial-aware Semantic Guidance for World-Action Models
- 2026τ0-VLA: a Hierarchical Robot Foundation Model with World-Model-Guided Test-Time Computation