mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The DAWN of World-Action Interactive Models

arXiv 2605.11550 ↗First posted 12 May 2026cs.CVcited by 7

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

Abstract (arXiv)

A plausible scene evolution depends on the maneuver being considered, while a good maneuver depends on how the scene may evolve. Existing World Action Models (WAMs) largely miss this reciprocity, treating world prediction and action generation as either isolated parallel branches or rigid predict-then-plan pipelines. We formalize this perspective as World-Action Interactive Models (WAIMs), and instantiate it in autonomous driving with DAWN (Denoising Actions and World iNteractive model), a simple yet strong latent generative baseline. DAWN operates in a compact semantic latent space and couples a World Predictor with a World-Conditioned Action Denoiser: the predicted world hypothesis conditions action denoising, while the denoised action hypothesis is fed back to update the world prediction, so that both are recursively refined during inference. Rather than eliminating test-time world evolution altogether or rolling out the full future in pixel space, DAWN performs a short explicit latent rollout that is sufficient to support long-horizon trajectory generation in complex interactive scenes. Experiments show that DAWN achieves strong planning performance and favorable safety-related results across multiple autonomous driving benchmarks. More broadly, our results suggest that interactive world-action generation is a principled path toward truly actionable world models.

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 31 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

Builds on

31 of 65 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  2. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  3. 2025From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Prediction22 Oct
  4. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  5. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun

Other references · 26

  1. 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 618
  2. 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 287
  3. 2024Hydra-MDP: End-to-end Multimodal Planning with Multi-target Hydra-Distillationcited by 244
  4. 2024Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Modelcited by 161
  5. 2023ADriver-I: A General World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 102
  6. 2025Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillationcited by 93
  7. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AIcited by 65
  8. 2025A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 60
  9. 2025iPad: Iterative Proposal-centric End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 41
  10. 2025DriveDPO: Policy Learning via Safety DPO For End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 39
  11. 2026Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memorycited by 37
  12. 2025VaViM and VaVAM: Autonomous Driving through Video Generative Modelingcited by 34
14 more
  1. 2026SGDrive: Scene-to-Goal Hierarchical World Cognition for Autonomous Drivingcited by 34
  2. 2026Latent-WAM: Latent World Action Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 27
  3. 2026Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 26
  4. 2025ImagiDrive: A Unified Imagination-and-Planning Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 24
  5. 2025Future-Aware End-to-End Driving: Bidirectional Modeling of Trajectory Planning and Scene Evolutioncited by 22
  6. 2025UniFuture: A 4D Driving World Model for Future Generation and Perceptioncited by 21
  7. 2026UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 17
  8. 2025WAM-Flow: Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Motion Planning via Discrete Flow Matching for Autonomous Drivingcited by 15
  9. 2026WildWorld: A Large-Scale Dataset for Dynamic World Modeling with Actions and Explicit State toward Generative ARPGcited by 13
  10. 2025Percept-WAM: Perception-Enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 9
  11. 2026Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Drivingcited by 9
  12. 2026CausalVAD: De-confounding End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Causal Interventioncited by 7
  13. 2025VLA-R: Vision-Language Action Retrieval toward Open-World End-to-End Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
  14. 2026UniDWM: Towards a Unified Driving World Model via Multifaceted Representation Learningcited by 3

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. 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models
  2. 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement
  3. 2026DeltaWAM: Distilling Action Tangent Fields into World Action Models
  4. 2026What Makes World Action Models Generalize? An Empirical Study of Test-Time Future Modeling
  5. 2026Contrastive World Models
  6. 2026Physically Native World Models: A Hamiltonian Perspective on Generative World Modeling
  7. 2026CtrlWAM: Controllable World Action Models with Aligned Intent and Foresight
  8. 2026Towards Interactive Video World Modeling: Frontiers, Challenges, Benchmarks, and Future Trends