mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Point Tracking Improves World Action Models

arXiv 2605.23856 ↗First posted 22 May 2026cs.ROcited by 7

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Robot policy learning benefits from world-action models that capture environment dynamics, but pixel-level prediction entangles dynamics with nuisance factors such as lighting and texture, making learned representations vulnerable to task-irrelevant visual variation. We propose JOPAT, a JOint Pixel-And-Track World-Action Model that predicts latent visual observations, 2D point tracks with visibility, and actions in a single denoising diffusion transformer. The key insight is that tracks provide an explicit representation of motion that captures long-horizon dynamics and remains robust under occlusion or partial out-of-frame motion, offering greater utility than modeling pixel appearance alone. On LIBERO and real-world LeRobot tasks, JOPAT improves over pixel-based baselines, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks involving occlusion, object interaction, and off-screen motion.

Key facts. Cited by 7 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 61 of its 82 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

Builds on

61 of 82 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
  2. 2026AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps13 Apr
  3. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  4. 2026PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation7 Jan
  5. 2025WMPO: World Model-based Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models12 Nov
  6. 2025A Step Toward World Models: A Survey on Robotic Manipulation31 Oct
  7. 2025Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model31 Oct
  8. 2025villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models31 Jul
  9. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
  10. 2024WARPD: World model Assisted Reactive Policy Diffusion17 Oct
  11. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 50

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  2. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,356
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  4. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  5. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
  6. 2017Decoupled Weight Decay Regularizationcited by 1,831
  7. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  8. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,568
  9. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,484
  10. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 883
  11. 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 864
  12. 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasetcited by 852
38 more
  1. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 750
  2. 2022R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulationcited by 694
  3. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 665
  4. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
  5. 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 519
  6. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 451
  7. 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 364
  8. 2024ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulationcited by 315
  9. 2024GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulationcited by 296
  10. 2022TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Videocited by 263
  11. 2022Masked Visual Pre-training for Motor Controlcited by 248
  12. 2017Stochastic Variational Video Predictioncited by 234
  13. 2023Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learningcited by 215
  14. 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 213
  15. 2025HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 181
  16. 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 153
  17. 2025Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 134
  18. 2024MOKA: Open-World Robotic Manipulation through Mark-Based Visual Promptingcited by 129
  19. 2024CoTracker3: Simpler and Better Point Tracking by Pseudo-Labelling Real Videoscited by 128
  20. 2025GR-3 Technical Reportcited by 111
  21. 2025PD-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Model Integrated with Action Chunking via Parallel Decodingcited by 88
  22. 2025Dita: Scaling Diffusion Transformer for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Policycited by 74
  23. 2025CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsificationcited by 74
  24. 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 69
  25. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AIcited by 68
  26. 2025Pure Vision Language Action (VLA) Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 49
  27. 2025Unified Diffusion VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model via Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Processcited by 39
  28. 2025VLA-Arena: An Open-Source Framework for Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 31
  29. 2025ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actionscited by 26
  30. 2025Enhancing Generalization in Vision-Language-Action Models by Preserving Pretrained Representationscited by 25
  31. 2025Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flowcited by 25
  32. 2026Sparse Autoencoders Reveal Interpretable and Steerable Features in VLA Modelscited by 16
  33. 2025Pixel Motion as Universal Representation for Robot Controlcited by 15
  34. 2025STAR: Learning Diverse Robot Skill Abstractions through Rotation-Augmented Vector Quantizationcited by 13
  35. 2025Pixel Motion Diffusion is What We Need for Robot Controlcited by 7
  36. 20263PoinTr: From Human Videos to Robot Policies with 3D Point-Track Planscited by 7
  37. 2025Generalizable Coarse-to-Fine Robot Manipulation via Language-Aligned 3D Keypointscited by 3
  38. 2025Translating Flow to Policy via Hindsight Online Imitationcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Process
  2. 2026WorldDiT: A Unified Diffusion Architecture for World and Action Modeling
  3. 2026Robot-Factored World Models via Robot Rendering
  4. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model
  5. 2026DeltaWAM: Distilling Action Tangent Fields into World Action Models
  6. 2026AcrossWAM1.0:A Modular Latent World-Action Stack for Compact Robot Policies
  7. 2026Reconstruction or Semantics? What Makes a Latent Space Useful for Robotic World Models
  8. 2026Beyond Future Prediction: Denoising as Generative Adaptation for Robot Control