# GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 139 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 53 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07864/) (2024)
- [RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18088/) (2025)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10274/) (2025)
- [Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16163/) (2026)
- [Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13030/) (2025)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04447/) (2025)
- [EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11709/) (2025)
- [PaliGemma 2: A Family of Versatile VLMs for Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03555/) (2024)
- [RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12377/) (2024)
- [RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13877/) (2024)
- [VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09372/) (2025)
- [mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15692/) (2025)
- [GR-3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15493/) (2025)
- [Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18945/) (2025)
- [Galaxea Open-World Dataset and G0 Dual-System VLA Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00576/) (2025)
- [Pandora: Towards General World Model with Natural Language Actions and Video States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09455/) (2024)
- [OpenHelix: A Short Survey, Empirical Analysis, and Open-Source Dual-System VLA Model for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03912/) (2025)
- [Point Mamba: A Novel Point Cloud Backbone Based on State Space Model with Octree-Based Ordering Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06467/) (2024)
- [VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00406/) (2025)
- [Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18632/) (2025)
- [VideoVLA: Video Generators Can Be Generalizable Robot Manipulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06963/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 139)

- [Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26694/) (2026)
- [LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15768/) (2026)
- [World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12090/) (2026)
- [World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00080/) (2026)
- [AHA-WAM:Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Modeling with Observation-Guided Context Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09811/) (2026)
- [DSpark: Confidence-Scheduled Speculative Decoding with Semi-Autoregressive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05147/) (2026)
- [ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17898/) (2026)
- [RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04434/) (2026)
- [ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19531/) (2026)
- [Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22078/) (2026)
- [ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00678/) (2026)
- [Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15330/) (2026)
- [INTENT: Invariance and Discrimination-aware Noise Mitigation for Robust Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18051/) (2026)
- [HABIT: Chrono-Synergia Robust Progressive Learning Framework for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18037/) (2026)
- [When to Trust Imagination: Adaptive Action Execution for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06222/) (2026)
- [Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05254/) (2026)
- [World Action Verifier: Self-Improving World Models via Forward-Inverse Asymmetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01985/) (2026)
- [Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10040/) (2026)
- [DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01765/) (2026)
- [FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13017/) (2026)
- [Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05468/) (2026)
- [Disentangled Robot Learning via Separate Forward and Inverse Dynamics Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16391/) (2026)
- [DriveWAM: Video Generative Priors Enable Scalable World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28544/) (2026)
- [RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13674/) (2026)
- [MemoryWAM: Efficient World Action Modeling with Persistent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20562/) (2026)
- [Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26103/) (2026)
- [AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11135/) (2026)
- [World Action Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20781/) (2026)
- [Is the Future Compatible? Diagnosing Dynamic Consistency in World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07514/) (2026)
- [GeoSem-WAM: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03188/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.