WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.
Key facts. Cited by 15 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 45 of its 70 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.
Builds on
45 of 70 references.
Closest ancestors · 13
Same direction, newest first
- 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI12 May
- 2026Embody4D: A Generalist Data Engine for Embodied 4D World Modeling3 May
- 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 Apr
- 2026STARRY: Spatial-Temporal Action-Centric World Modeling for Robotic Manipulation29 Apr
- 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
- 2026ABot-PhysWorld: Interactive World Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Physics Alignment24 Mar
- 2026Kinema4D: Kinematic 4D World Modeling for Spatiotemporal Embodied Simulation17 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation10 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
- 2025TesserAct: Learning 4D Embodied World Models29 Apr
Other references · 32
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,581
- 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
- 2022Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,778
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,568
- 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,484
- 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 692
- 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 519
- 2025π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learningcited by 319
- 2026Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexitycited by 160
20 more
- 2026π0.7: a Steerable Generalist Robotic Foundation Model with Emergent Capabilitiescited by 138
- 2025Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Modelcited by 134
- 2024ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulationcited by 108
- 2024textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Drivingcited by 105
- 2024Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Modelscited by 83
- 2025GeoVLA: Empowering 3D Representations in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 70
- 2025WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interactioncited by 67
- 2026NeoVerse: Enhancing 4D World Model with in-the-wild Monocular Videoscited by 46
- 2026Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worldscited by 44
- 2026VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 39
- 2024Splat-MOVER: Multi-Stage, Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation via Editable Gaussian Splattingcited by 38
- 2026LaST0: Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought for Robotic Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 31
- 2026VGGT-Omegacited by 26
- 2026Genie Sim 3.0 : A High-Fidelity Comprehensive Simulation Platform for Humanoid Robotcited by 14
- 2026Wow, wo, val! A Comprehensive Embodied World Model Evaluation Turing Testcited by 13
- 2026Pelican-Unify 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Actioncited by 8
- 2026ParkGaussian: Surround-view 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Parkingcited by 7
- 2026PhyMix: Towards Physically Consistent Single-Image 3D Indoor Scene Generation with Implicit--Explicit Optimizationcited by 2
- 2026VEGA: Visual Encoder Grounding Alignment for Spatially-Aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 2
- 2026Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Aerial Viewscited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.
15 papers.
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- 2026Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Modelscited by 15
- 20264D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fieldscited by 13
- 2026LD4WAM: Learning Latent Dynamics from Human Videos for World Action Modelscited by 3
- 2026SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Drivingcited by 2
- 2026Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Modelscited by 2
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modelingcited by 1
- 2026Breaking Structural Isolation: Scalable Graph Clustering via Community-Aware Sampling and Structural Entropycited by 0
- 2026Temporal Forcing: 4D Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026Spatial Grafting: Grounding 3D Features for Flow-Matching Robot Policiescited by 0
- 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
3 more
- 2026Thinker-WM: A Unified World Model with Shared Multimodal Representations for Embodied Intelligence13 Oct 2026
- 2026SimForcing: Distilling Simulation Motion Priors into Real-Domain Robot World Models5 Oct 2026
- 2026XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generation2 Oct 2026
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling29 Sep 2026
- 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Spatial Grafting: Grounding 3D Features for Flow-Matching Robot Policies28 Sep 2026
- 2026Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulation16 Sep 2026
- 2026Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models15 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Models6 Sep 2026
- 2026Temporal Forcing: 4D Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models31 Aug 2026
- 2026LD4WAM: Learning Latent Dynamics from Human Videos for World Action Models23 Aug 2026
- 20264D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields8 Aug 2026
3 more
- 2026Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Modelscited by 15
- 20264D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fieldscited by 13
- 2026LD4WAM: Learning Latent Dynamics from Human Videos for World Action Modelscited by 3
- 2026Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Modelscited by 2
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modelingcited by 1
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026Spatial Grafting: Grounding 3D Features for Flow-Matching Robot Policiescited by 0
- 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generationcited by 0
- 2026SimForcing: Distilling Simulation Motion Priors into Real-Domain Robot World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Thinker-WM: A Unified World Model with Shared Multimodal Representations for Embodied Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026Thinker-WM: A Unified World Model with Shared Multimodal Representations for Embodied Intelligence13 Oct 2026
- 2026SimForcing: Distilling Simulation Motion Priors into Real-Domain Robot World Models5 Oct 2026
- 2026XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generation2 Oct 2026
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling29 Sep 2026
- 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Spatial Grafting: Grounding 3D Features for Flow-Matching Robot Policies28 Sep 2026
- 2026Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulation16 Sep 2026
- 2026Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models15 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Models6 Sep 2026
- 2026LD4WAM: Learning Latent Dynamics from Human Videos for World Action Models23 Aug 2026
- 20264D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields8 Aug 2026
- 2026Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Models6 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?
- 2026Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion
- 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
- 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
- 2026UNITAS: A 3D-Native World Action Model for Embodied Manipulation
- 2026Box-WAM: Box Trajectories as Compact State Representations for World Action Models
- 2026Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination
- 2026AHA-WAM:Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Modeling with Observation-Guided Context Routing