mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AHA-WAM:Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Modeling with Observation-Guided Context Routing

arXiv 2606.09811 ↗First posted 8 Jun 2026cs.RO cs.AI cs.CVcited by 46

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning. However, existing world-action models couple world prediction and action execution at the same temporal resolution, forcing the world branch to model near-term frame variations that are redundant and weakly informative. We posit that strictly binding world prediction and action execution to the same temporal rhythm may underutilize the potential of the video branch for embodied control. Therefore, we propose AHA-WAM, an Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Model built on a dual Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that reorganizes world-action modeling around this temporal asymmetry. AHA-WAM instantiates the video DiT as a low-frequency world planner that maintains rolling key-value memory over past observations and exposes reusable layerwise latent context encoding long-horizon scene evolution, while a high-frequency action DiT executes short action chunks in closed loop by querying this context through layerwise joint attention. To support asynchronous execution, we introduce horizon-adaptive offset training and Observation-Guided Video-Context Routing (OVCR), which together let the action expert exploit long-horizon world context while remaining responsive to real-time execution state without rerunning the video DiT. Experiments on RoboTwin and real-world manipulation tasks show that AHA-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance without any robot-data pretraining, attaining 92.80% average success on RoboTwin and 78.3% success across 4 real-world tasks, while reaching 24.17 Hz closed-loop control with a 4.59x speedup over Fast-WAM.

Key facts. Cited by 46 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 38 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

Builds on

38 of 38 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
  2. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  3. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  4. 2026DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos6 Feb
  5. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
  6. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
  7. 2024Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation19 Dec
  8. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 30

  1. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  2. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  4. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  6. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,348
  7. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
  8. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  9. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,253
  10. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
  11. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 883
  12. 2024RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 691
18 more
  1. 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 522
  2. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
  3. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 410
  4. 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 303
  5. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
  6. 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 289
  7. 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 216
  8. 2025HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 181
  9. 2026Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexitycited by 160
  10. 2025Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 108
  11. 2026ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learningcited by 103
  12. 2025Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policiescited by 90
  13. 2025RoboCOIN: An Open-Sourced Bimanual Robotic Data Collection for Integrated Manipulationcited by 78
  14. 2024Towards Synergistic, Generalized, and Efficient Dual-System for Robotic Manipulationcited by 73
  15. 2023SkillDiffuser: Interpretable Hierarchical Planning via Skill Abstractions in Diffusion-Based Task Executioncited by 70
  16. 2025Unified Diffusion VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model via Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Processcited by 39
  17. 2026AsyncVLA: An Asynchronous VLA for Fast and Robust Navigation on the Edgecited by 10
  18. 2026HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation Systemcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 46.

46 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policiescited by 40
  2. 2026Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?cited by 9
  3. 2026LiLa-WAM: Lightweight Latent Reasoning World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 9
  4. 2026WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Timecited by 8
  5. 2026Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Evaluationcited by 6
  6. 2026Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 6
  7. 2026Rethink Before You Execute: Adaptive Execution for World Action Modelscited by 4
  8. 2026ZimaBlue: Evolving Generalizable World Action Models through Scalable Video Pre-trainingcited by 4
  9. 2026Enfold: Folding World Model Imagination into Predictive Representations for Ultra-Efficient Embodied Controlcited by 3
  10. 2026TacWAM: Anchor-Guided World Action Model with Mechanics-Aware Tactile Predictioncited by 3
  11. 2026FA-RDP: A Frequency-Adaptive Reactive Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 3
  12. 2026FBFM: A Training-Free Asynchronous Feedback Mechanism for Flow-Matching in World-Action Models Executioncited by 3
34 more
  1. 2026PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5: A Toolkit for Robot Process Assessmentcited by 3
  2. 2026GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Modelscited by 3
  3. 2026Hierarchical Denoising For Multi-Step Visual Reasoningcited by 1
  4. 2026World Models for Embodied Intelligence: From Plausible to Controllable to Actionablecited by 1
  5. 2026Causal-History Test-Time Scaling for Failure Recovery in Autoregressive World-Action Modelscited by 1
  6. 2026MachEmbodied-U0: Unified Understanding and Generation Model for Embodied Intelligencecited by 1
  7. 2026Streaming-WAM: Action-Conditioned World-Action Model for Asynchronous Robot Manipulationcited by 1
  8. 2026Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imaginationcited by 1
  9. 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Datacited by 1
  10. 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modelingcited by 1
  11. 2026UniWAM: Unified World-Action Modelcited by 1
  12. 2026Long-WAM: Scaling the Context of World-Action Modelscited by 1
  13. 2026Paired Exact-Reset Evaluation of a Prediction-Derived Medium-to-Full World-Model Cascadecited by 0
  14. 2026MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Modelscited by 0
  15. 2026Grounded Action Model: 3D Grounding as a Foundation for Roboticscited by 0
  16. 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinementcited by 0
  17. 2026An Action Is Worth One Patch: Unified World-Action Modeling with PatchWAMcited by 0
  18. 2026InternW0: A Foundational Physical World Model for Efficient Real-World Interactionscited by 0
  19. 2026Beyond Future Prediction: Denoising as Generative Adaptation for Robot Controlcited by 0
  20. 2026Devol-ONE: One Autoregressive Mixture of Transformers to Unify Vision-Language-Action and Latent World Modelingcited by 0
  21. 2026Copper-Policy: Focus on the Representation for Robust Robot Manipulationcited by 0
  22. 2026Dynamic Manipulation with World-Action Models via Counterfactual Planningcited by 0
  23. 2026D2-VLA: Dual-Memory Dual-Frequency Vision-Language-Action Model For Long Dynamic Manipulationcited by 0
  24. 2026Revision, Not Restart: Revisable Visual Plans for Closed-Loop World-Action Modelscited by 0
  25. 2026CogWAM: Aligning Semantic Cognition with World Action Modeling via Event-Driven Interfacescited by 0
  26. 2026Magic-W0: A Structured World-Action Foundation Model for Physical Intelligencecited by 0
  27. 2026SplineWAM: Adaptive Action Horizons for World Action Models via B-Spline Representationscited by 0
  28. 2026Learning Skills from Historical Action Trajectories: Action Experience Dictionary for World Action Modelscited by 0
  29. 2026Completion Aware Guidance for World Action Modelscited by 0
  30. 2026World-Calibrated Proposal-to-Action Flow for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
  31. 2026PerturBot: Breaking Shortcut Priors in Vision-Language-Action Models with Perturbative Trainingcited by 0
  32. 2026RealtimeWAM: One-Step Asynchronous World Action Modelscited by 0
  33. 2026BridgeWAM: Bridging Video and Action Experts via Latent Bridge Queriescited by 0
  34. 2026LoopWAM: Closed-Loop Generalist Policy Improvement from Deployment Rolloutscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models
  2. 2026WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Models
  3. 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
  4. 2026World Tokens: Enhancing Embodied Policies with Training-Time World Modeling
  5. 2026WorldScape Policy 2.0: Empowering Steerable World Action Modeling with Reasoning-Augmented Memory and In-Context Learning
  6. 2026Vid2WAM: Distilling Video Diffusion Priors into World Action Models
  7. 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models
  8. 2026Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion