mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AI

arXiv 2606.16533 ↗First posted 15 Jun 2026cs.AI cs.CVcited by 8

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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.

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77 of 187 references.

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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

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  4. 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI
  5. 2026InternW0: A Foundational Physical World Model for Efficient Real-World Interactions
  6. 2026World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
  7. 2026LaWM: Least Action World Models for Long-Horizon Physical Consistency from Visual Observations
  8. 2026Physically Viable World Models: A Case for Query-Conditioned Embodied AI