Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World action models inherit the predictive capability of world models, enabling action generation to be guided by anticipated future observations. However, they rely primarily on vision and often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where critical cues arise from physical interaction. In this paper, we propose Dream-Tac, a unified Tactile-World Action Model that jointly models actions, future visual observations, and tactile dynamics. Specifically, Dream-Tac introduces (i) contact-gated visuotactile fusion to selectively integrate tactile signals and (ii) a contact-aware attention bias to better regulate cross-modal interactions during manipulation. To support real-time deployment, we further design a dual-level acceleration strategy, reformulating the contact-aware bias to preserve the fused attention path during training and introducing cache-based diffusion acceleration at inference, achieving up to 2.9× faster training and 1.8× faster inference. Across six contact-rich manipulation tasks, Dream-Tac improves action accuracy by 31.7% on average, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified visuotactile world modeling.Code is available at https://github.com/LYFCLOUDFAN/Dream-Tac.
Key facts. Cited by 19 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 34 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2026.
Builds on
34 of 55 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Mask World Model: Predicting What Matters for Robust Robot Policy Learning21 Apr
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Visuo-Tactile World Models5 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025Act2Goal: From World Model To General Goal-conditioned Policy29 Dec
- 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
- 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
- 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
- 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
Other references · 25
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2019Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imaginationcited by 1,653
- 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,253
- 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 864
- 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
- 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 289
- 2024Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Modelcited by 269
- 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 213
- 2025World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AIcited by 200
- 2025Cosmos-Reason1: From Physical Common Sense To Embodied Reasoningcited by 164
- 2025Genie Envisioner: A Unified World Foundation Platform for Robotic Manipulationcited by 137
13 more
- 2025Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 108
- 2025ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulationcited by 91
- 2025WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interactioncited by 67
- 2025VTLA: Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Preference Learning for Insertion Manipulationcited by 55
- 2025ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulationcited by 38
- 2025VLA-Touch: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Dual-Level Tactile Feedbackcited by 38
- 2025OmniVTLA: Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Models with Semantic-Aligned Tactile Sensingcited by 38
- 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 32
- 2025Touch in the Wild: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with a Portable Visuo-Tactile Grippercited by 29
- 2025Tactile-VLA: Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Model's Physical Knowledge for Tactile Generalizationcited by 19
- 2025CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-Worldcited by 18
- 2025Token Expand-Merge: Training-Free Token Compression for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 7
- 2025Self-evolved Imitation Learning in Simulated Worldcited by 4
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 19.
19 papers.
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- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Surveycited by 6
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 4
- 2026DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulationcited by 4
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026τ: Learning Touch-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models from Future Visual Supervisioncited by 2
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Trainingcited by 1
- 2026Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learningcited by 1
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Controlcited by 1
- 2026RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026Disentangling Visuo-Tactile Foresight: Oracle-Guided Interface Discovery for World Action Modelscited by 0
7 more
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imaginationcited by 0
- 2026HapticWAM: Distilling Imagined Touch into a World-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensingcited by 0
- 2026Uni-VLaT: Whole-Body Tactile Adaptation of VLA Policies for Humanoid Loco-Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Modelcited by 0
- 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models12 Oct 2026
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model30 Sep 2026
- 2026Uni-VLaT: Whole-Body Tactile Adaptation of VLA Policies for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation28 Sep 2026
- 2026HapticWAM: Distilling Imagined Touch into a World-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensing20 Sep 2026
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control17 Sep 2026
- 2026DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imagination8 Sep 2026
- 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation4 Sep 2026
- 2026N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence30 Aug 2026
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation21 Aug 2026
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation20 Aug 2026
- 2026Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learning2 Aug 2026
- 2026DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulation1 Aug 2026
7 more
- 2026Disentangling Visuo-Tactile Foresight: Oracle-Guided Interface Discovery for World Action Models1 Aug 2026
- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey27 Jul 2026
- 2026τ: Learning Touch-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models from Future Visual Supervision27 Jul 2026
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation26 Jul 2026
- 2026RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation21 Jul 2026
- 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Training3 Jul 2026
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation11 Jun 2026
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 4
- 2026DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulationcited by 4
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Trainingcited by 1
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Controlcited by 1
- 2026RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026Disentangling Visuo-Tactile Foresight: Oracle-Guided Interface Discovery for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026HapticWAM: Distilling Imagined Touch into a World-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensingcited by 0
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Modelcited by 0
- 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models12 Oct 2026
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model30 Sep 2026
- 2026HapticWAM: Distilling Imagined Touch into a World-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensing20 Sep 2026
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control17 Sep 2026
- 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation4 Sep 2026
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation20 Aug 2026
- 2026DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulation1 Aug 2026
- 2026Disentangling Visuo-Tactile Foresight: Oracle-Guided Interface Discovery for World Action Models1 Aug 2026
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation26 Jul 2026
- 2026RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation21 Jul 2026
- 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Training3 Jul 2026
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation11 Jun 2026
- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Surveycited by 6
- 2026Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learningcited by 1
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imaginationcited by 0
- 2026DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imagination8 Sep 2026
- 2026N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence30 Aug 2026
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation21 Aug 2026
- 2026Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learning2 Aug 2026
- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey27 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2026TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2026OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation
- 2026UniVTAC: A Unified Simulation Platform for Visuo-Tactile Manipulation Data Generation, Learning, and Benchmarking
- 2026ForeTac-VLA: A Forecasting-Based Tactile-Vision-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation
- 2026VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2026UniTacVLA: Unified Tactile Understanding and Prediction in Vision Language Action Models
- 2026DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation