mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Light-WAM: Efficient World Action Models with State-Fusion Action Decoding

arXiv 2606.08242 ↗First posted 6 Jun 2026cs.CVcited by 23

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) extend robot policy learning by incorporating future prediction as an additional training objective, encouraging the policy to encode task-relevant temporal structure in its representations. Current WAMs often rely on large-scale generative architectures that incur high training costs and inference latency, making them difficult to deploy as efficient closed-loop policies. We propose Light-WAM, a lightweight World Action Model for efficient robot manipulation. Specifically, it is built with a compact video backbone and performs future-video supervision in a downsampled latent space, reducing the cost of video co-training while retaining its benefits for representation learning. For action prediction, Light-WAM introduces the StateFusionActionExpert, which reads adapted states from multiple backbone layers, fuses them through learned-query pooling, and directly predicts action chunks in a single forward pass. This design provides an efficient interface between video backbone representations and robot actions, avoiding the need for heavy generative action experts. Experiments demonstrate that Light-WAM maintains strong performance on LIBERO and achieves usable multi-task performance on RoboTwin 2.0, while using only 0.44B trainable parameters. It also achieves 72.03ms inference latency with 4.1GiB peak GPU memory and improved training throughput.

Key facts. Cited by 23 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 35 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2026.

Builds on

35 of 38 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

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. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
  4. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
  5. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
  6. 2024RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination18 Apr

Other references · 29

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,137
  3. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  4. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  5. 2016Layer Normalizationcited by 5,669
  6. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  7. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  8. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  9. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  10. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
  11. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  12. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
17 more
  1. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
  2. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 883
  3. 2023Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Modelscited by 862
  4. 2024RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 691
  5. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
  6. 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 522
  7. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
  8. 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 364
  9. 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 303
  10. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 303
  11. 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 289
  12. 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 216
  13. 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 205
  14. 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 153
  15. 2025VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 145
  16. 2025Genie Envisioner: A Unified World Foundation Platform for Robotic Manipulationcited by 137
  17. 2025Video Generators are Robot Policiescited by 92

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 23.

23 papers.

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  1. 2026Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robotscited by 20
  2. 2026Faster-WAM: Efficient Inference-Time Future Conditioning for Robust World Action Modelscited by 17
  3. 2026Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?cited by 9
  4. 2026Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Evaluationcited by 6
  5. 2026GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Modelscited by 3
  6. 2026UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigationcited by 2
  7. 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulationcited by 1
  8. 2026Robust Bimanual Vision-Language-Action Models via Embarrassingly Simple Modality Maskingcited by 1
  9. 2026Streaming-WAM: Action-Conditioned World-Action Model for Asynchronous Robot Manipulationcited by 1
  10. 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Modelscited by 0
  11. 2026Think Like a World Model, Act Like a VLA: Distilling World-Model Representations into Compact Robot Policiescited by 0
  12. 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinementcited by 0
11 more
  1. 2026DeltaWAM: Change-Centric Visual Foresight via Delta Tokens for an Efficient World-Action Modelcited by 0
  2. 2026What Makes World Action Models Generalize? An Empirical Study of Test-Time Future Modelingcited by 0
  3. 2026Revision, Not Restart: Revisable Visual Plans for Closed-Loop World-Action Modelscited by 0
  4. 2026LIBERO-MAX: Do Robot Policies Adapt When the World Changes?cited by 0
  5. 2026Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imaginationcited by 0
  6. 2026DeepJEPA: Scaling World Models from Withincited by 0
  7. 2026WAMJET: A Harness for World Action Model Accelerationcited by 0
  8. 2026RealtimeWAM: One-Step Asynchronous World Action Modelscited by 0
  9. 2026OpenWAM: An Open Framework for Composable World-Action Modelscited by 0
  10. 2026WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Modelscited by 0
  11. 2026SmolWAM: A Latent World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devicescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
  2. 2026GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch
  3. 2026Box-WAM: Box Trajectories as Compact State Representations for World Action Models
  4. 2026EVO-WAM: Evolving World Action Models through Video-Action Verification
  5. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model
  6. 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
  7. 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
  8. 2026DIM-WAM: World-Action Modeling with Diverse Historical Event Memory