mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MotionWAM: Towards Foundation World Action Models for Real-Time Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

arXiv 2606.09215 ↗First posted 8 Jun 2026cs.ROcited by 8

On the map: World models → Humanoid and legged locomotion world models

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) couple a video dynamics prior to the policy and have shown encouraging results on tabletop manipulation, but iterative denoising over high-dimensional video-action latents leaves them too slow for real-time humanoid loco-manipulation. The problem is compounded by the dominant hierarchical paradigm, in which a high-level manipulation policy controls only the upper body while a low-level controller tracks coarse base commands -- placing upper and lower body in inconsistent action spaces and reducing the legs to balance-preserving locomotion. We present MotionWAM, a real-time WAM that drives autonomous humanoid loco-manipulation from a single egocentric camera by conditioning the policy on the intermediate denoising features of a video world model. MotionWAM replaces the upper-lower split with a unified motion latent and predicts whole-body motion tokens that jointly cover locomotion, torso motion, height regulation, foot interaction, and hand manipulation in a single action space. A three-stage learning framework progressively adapts the video world model to egocentric visual dynamics and to the target humanoid embodiment. On nine real-world Unitree G1 tasks, MotionWAM runs in real time, substantially outperforms Vision-Language-Action (VLA) baselines fine-tuned on the same demonstrations by over 30% in overall success rate, and executes task-driven foot interaction that decoupled upper-lower policies cannot reach. Our results suggest that video-pretrained WAMs can be lifted from tabletop manipulation to coordinated, human-like whole-body humanoid control.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Humanoid and legged locomotion world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

Builds on

40 of 49 references.

References · 40

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28 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026WB-WAM: Heterogeneous Body-Hand Pre-training for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation ↗
  2. 2026DECOWAM: Decoupled Whole-Body World-Action Model for Legged Mobile Manipulation
  3. 2026Towards a General Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Model via Egocentric Whole-Body Human Data Pretraining ↗
  4. 2026SIMPLE: Simulation-Based Policy Learning and Evaluation for Humanoid Loco-manipulation
  5. 2026HumanoidMimicGen: Data Generation for Loco-Manipulation via Whole-Body Planning
  6. 2026MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight
  7. 2026EgoHumanoid-V2: Human-to-Humanoid Transfer of Coordinated Whole-Body Skills for Loco-Manipulation
  8. 2026MetaWorld-X: Hierarchical World Modeling via VLM-Orchestrated Experts for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation