SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation
On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reinforcement learning and post-training
Abstract (arXiv)
Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of 0.929 and MMRV of 0.119, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning and post-training, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 24 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2026.
Builds on
24 of 25 references.
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Other references · 23
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2018Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Modelscited by 774
- 2020MOReL : Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 590
- 2024Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulationcited by 495
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
- 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasetscited by 240
- 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 205
- 2025World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AIcited by 200
- 2025WorldMem: Long-term Consistent World Simulation with Memorycited by 168
- 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 167
11 more
- 2026Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AIcited by 165
- 2024IRASim: A Fine-Grained World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 100
- 2025WorldGym: World Model as An Environment for Policy Evaluationcited by 64
- 2025RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policiescited by 64
- 2025Evaluating Gemini Robotics Policies in a Veo World Simulatorcited by 51
- 2025PolaRiS: Scalable Real-to-Sim Evaluations for Generalist Robot Policiescited by 33
- 2026Interactive World Simulator for Robot Policy Training and Evaluationcited by 31
- 2026RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policiescited by 24
- 2026World Action Verifier: Self-Improving World Models via Forward-Inverse Asymmetrycited by 18
- 2025World Models That Know When They Don't Know - Controllable Video Generation with Calibrated Uncertaintycited by 17
- 2026dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Modelcited by 13
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026Scaling Mixture-of-Experts Video Pretraining for Embodied Intelligencecited by 15
- 2026WorldSimProbe: Diagnosing Simulator Faithfulness in Action-Conditioned World Models for Embodied Manipulationcited by 2
- 2026IMPLY: Physically Anchored Consistency for World-Model Rolloutscited by 0
- 2026RoboCoach: World Models as Active Coaches for Compositional Robot Skillscited by 0
- 2026Beyond Successful Robot Demonstrations: Learning from Human Interactions and Modeling Failure Dynamicscited by 0
- 2026Data-Free Continual Learning for World Action Model with Rectified Generative Replaycited by 0
- 2026WorldOracle: Benchmarking Action-Conditioned World Models against Real-World Executionscited by 0
- 2026WorldOracle: Benchmarking Action-Conditioned World Models against Real-World Executions13 Oct 2026
- 2026Data-Free Continual Learning for World Action Model with Rectified Generative Replay13 Oct 2026
- 2026Beyond Successful Robot Demonstrations: Learning from Human Interactions and Modeling Failure Dynamics9 Oct 2026
- 2026RoboCoach: World Models as Active Coaches for Compositional Robot Skills30 Sep 2026
- 2026IMPLY: Physically Anchored Consistency for World-Model Rollouts11 Sep 2026
- 2026WorldSimProbe: Diagnosing Simulator Faithfulness in Action-Conditioned World Models for Embodied Manipulation10 Aug 2026
- 2026Scaling Mixture-of-Experts Video Pretraining for Embodied Intelligence8 Jul 2026
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