SANTS: A State-Adaptive Scheduler for World Action Models
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot manipulation by using video-based future representations to condition action generation. In pixel-space WAMs, however, the best action condition is not necessarily the fully denoised video. Controlled denoising-depth scans show that video refinement can reduce action error up to a state-dependent point, after which the gain may saturate or even reverse when late predictions become less action-relevant or physically unreliable. This suggests that action generation should use a state-dependent point along the video noise trajectory rather than a fixed terminal denoising depth. We introduce State-Adaptive Noise Trajectory Scheduler (SANTS), a lightweight scheduler for video-to-action diffusion policies. At each video decision point, SANTS reads the current video-state representation and noise level, then jointly predicts a cumulative stopping hazard and a relative noise-progression ratio. SANTS is post-trained with a path-level reward computed after the frozen action branch generates the final action chunk, so the scheduler is optimized for downstream action quality rather than intermediate video fidelity, while redundant video-state updates are explicitly penalized. Experiments show that SANTS reaches (94.4%) overall success on RoboTwin 2.0 and (73.1%) average success across seven real-robot tasks, while reducing latency by (81.7%) and (79.0%) relative to full video denoising, respectively. These results indicate that adaptive selection along the video noise trajectory can preserve the control benefits of WAM-style future reasoning while removing much of its redundant inference cost.
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 33 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.
Builds on
33 of 41 references.
Closest ancestors · 16
Same direction, newest first
- 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI12 May
- 2026HarmoWAM: Harmonizing Generalizable and Precise Manipulation via Adaptive World Action Models11 May
- 2026Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action8 May
- 2026OA-WAM: Object-Addressable World Action Model for Robust Robot Manipulation7 May
- 2026Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos30 Apr
- 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 Apr
- 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation25 Feb
- 2026RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model11 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
4 more
Other references · 17
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
- 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 364
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
- 2024GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulationcited by 296
- 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 289
- 2023DPM-Solver-v3: Improved Diffusion ODE Solver with Empirical Model Statisticscited by 161
- 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
- 2024Align Your Steps: Optimizing Sampling Schedules in Diffusion Modelscited by 96
- 2026DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 76
- 2024VidMan: Exploiting Implicit Dynamics from Video Diffusion Model for Effective Robot Manipulationcited by 46
5 more
- 2025ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actionscited by 26
- 2025Video2Act: A Dual-System Video Diffusion Policy with Robotic Spatio-Motional Modelingcited by 13
- 2025D3P: Dynamic Denoising Diffusion Policy via Reinforcement Learningcited by 10
- 2026Spectrally-Guided Diffusion Noise Schedulescited by 5
- 2026From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulationcited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026World Action Models: A Surveycited by 12
- 2026Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Evaluationcited by 6
- 2026World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Surveycited by 6
- 2026Paired Exact-Reset Evaluation of a Prediction-Derived Medium-to-Full World-Model Cascadecited by 0
- 2026ReSync: Re-Aligning the Two Clocks of Asynchronous World-Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Staircase Policy: Streaming Inference for World-Action Models with Large Action Chunkscited by 0
- 2026WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Models8 Oct 2026
- 2026Staircase Policy: Streaming Inference for World-Action Models with Large Action Chunks29 Sep 2026
- 2026ReSync: Re-Aligning the Two Clocks of Asynchronous World-Action Models27 Sep 2026
- 2026World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey13 Sep 2026
- 2026Paired Exact-Reset Evaluation of a Prediction-Derived Medium-to-Full World-Model Cascade30 Jul 2026
- 2026Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Evaluation20 Jul 2026
- 2026World Action Models: A Survey18 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imagination
- 2026Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models
- 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement
- 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026CtrlWAM: Controllable World Action Models with Aligned Intent and Foresight
- 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
- 2026SplineWAM: Adaptive Action Horizons for World Action Models via B-Spline Representations
- 2026Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination