Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AI
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Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce Kairos, a regret-aware native world-action model stack for Physical AI. Kairos is motivated by the view that a physical world model should not aim to fully simulate all future pixels, but should learn and maintain the information most relevant to embodiment control: object state, spatial relations, contact conditions, task progress, action consequences, failure boundaries, and deployment uncertainty. Kairos establishes three model-side prerequisites toward this goal. First, it learns control-relevant information through a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into an intervention-strength progression from passive physical observation to intentional behavior and embodied action grounding. Second, it maintains control-sufficient states through a unified understanding, generation, and prediction architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where local, mid-range, and global temporal pathways support multi-timescale state maintenance under efficient inference. Third, it deploys these states through a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design, treating latency, memory footprint, and hardware compatibility as first-order constraints for future observation, action, and feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model benchmarks, world-action benchmarks, long-horizon generation, and inference-efficiency evaluation show that Kairos achieves superior performance while offering a favorable efficiency to capability trade-off.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for navigation, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 77 of its 187 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.
Builds on
77 of 187 references.
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50 most cited of 77 All 77 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Surveycited by 4
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- 2026Astronex-World 1.0: Real-Time Interactive World Model Foundationcited by 3
- 2026From World Action Models to Embodied Brains: A Roadmap for Open-World Physical Intelligencecited by 1
- 2026Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worldscited by 1
- 2026Multi-Horizon Consistency as Geometry: When Latent Dynamics Contract, and When They Do Notcited by 0
- 2026Waypoint-1.5: A Real-Time Video World Model for Consumer Hardwarecited by 0
- 2026UniWAM: Unified World-Action Modelcited by 0
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- 2026Astronex-World 1.0: Real-Time Interactive World Model Foundation17 Sep 2026
- 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models12 Aug 2026
- 2026Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey27 Jul 2026
- 2026Multi-Horizon Consistency as Geometry: When Latent Dynamics Contract, and When They Do Not21 Jul 2026
- 2026From World Action Models to Embodied Brains: A Roadmap for Open-World Physical Intelligence13 Jul 2026
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