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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for navigation](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-navigation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18088/) (2025)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13626/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24744/) (2026)
- [Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11605/) (2026)
- [Astronex-World 1.0: Real-Time Interactive World Model Foundation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20034/) (2026)
- [From World Action Models to Embodied Brains: A Roadmap for Open-World Physical Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11689/) (2026)
- [Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34470/) (2026)
- [UniWAM: Unified World-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02054/) (2026)
- [Multi-Horizon Consistency as Geometry: When Latent Dynamics Contract, and When They Do Not](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21645/) (2026)
- [Waypoint-1.5: A Real-Time Video World Model for Consumer Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37107/) (2026)
- [1Step-WAM: Your World Action Model but Faster using 1-Step Action Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15625/) (2026)

## 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.