mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model

arXiv 2604.22152 ↗First posted 24 Apr 2026cs.ROcited by 11

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

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating robotics policies across thousands of environments and thousands of tasks is infeasible with existing approaches. This motivates the need for a new methodology for scalable robotics policy evaluation. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, which uses a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policies. Specifically, dWorldEval maps all modalities - including vision, language, and robotic actions - into a unified token space, modeling them via a single transformer-based denoising network. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, using a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policy. Specifically, it maps all modalities, including vision, language, and robotics action into a unified token space, then denoises them with a single transformer network. Building on this architecture, we employ a sparse keyframe memory to maintain spatiotemporal consistency. We also introduce a progress token that indicates the degree of task completion. At inference, the model jointly predicts future observations and progress token, allowing automatically determine success when the progress reaches 1. Extensive experiments demonstrate that dWorldEval significantly outperforms previous approaches, i.e., WorldEval, Ctrl-World, and WorldGym, on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and multiple real-robot tasks. It paves the way for a new architectural paradigm in building world simulators for robotics evaluation at scale.

Key facts. Cited by 11 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 26 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2026.

Builds on

26 of 45 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Scalable Policy Evaluation with Video World Models14 Nov
  2. 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation11 Oct
  3. 2025WorldEval: World Model as Real-World Robot Policies Evaluator25 May
  4. 2025EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation3 Jan
  5. 20243D-VLA: A 3D Vision-Language-Action Generative World Model14 Mar
  6. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
  7. 2020SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment19 Mar

Other references · 19

  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. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
  4. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  5. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
  6. 2025Large Language Diffusion Modelscited by 872
  7. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
  8. 2024Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Modelscited by 800
  9. 2023Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distributioncited by 712
  10. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 643
  11. 2023Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generationcited by 633
  12. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 440
7 more
  1. 2025DexVLA: Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for General Robot Controlcited by 191
  2. 2025HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 176
  3. 2025Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policiescited by 90
  4. 2025LaViDa: A Large Diffusion Language Model for Multimodal Understandingcited by 81
  5. 2025VLAS: Vision-Language-Action Model With Speech Instructions For Customized Robot Manipulationcited by 48
  6. 2025LLaDA-VLA: Vision Language Diffusion Action Modelscited by 30
  7. 2025dVLA: Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model with Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 30

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026RoboWorld: Fast and Reliable Neural Simulators for Generalist Robot Policy Evaluation
  2. 2026GigaWorld-1: A Roadmap to Build World Models for Robot Policy Evaluation
  3. 2026IndustrialVLA-Bench: A Traceable Multi-Axis Evaluation of Open Robot Policy Models
  4. 2024Diffusion Transformer Policy
  5. 2025Reliable and Scalable Robot Policy Evaluation with Imperfect Simulators
  6. 2025WorldGym: World Model as An Environment for Policy Evaluation
  7. 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Process
  8. 2026DriftWorld: Fast World Modeling through Drifting