DSWAM: A Dual-System World Action Foundation Model for Fine-Grained Robot Manipulation
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
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Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models (WAMs) provide a promising alternative to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies by using video-based world modeling as dense supervision for robot action learning. Existing WAMs excel at physically grounded execution, but typically lack the explicit language-level planning interface in VLM-based VLAs for decomposing coarse instructions. Such decomposition becomes important when household tasks involve complex multi-step goals, where coarse user commands need to be converted into sequences of fine-grained executable subtasks. Meanwhile, the field still lacks a fair real-robot comparison between VLA and WAM execution capabilities, since existing systems often differ in data, robot embodiments, and task protocols. To address both the decomposition gap and the need for a controlled WAM-VLA comparison, we introduce DSWAM, a Dual-System World Action Foundation Model for fine-grained robot manipulation. DSWAM keeps a System 1 WAM executor as the default control path and optionally activates a System 2 vision-language subtask planner only when task decomposition is useful. The planner predicts executable subtasks from short-term visual history and a global task prompt, while the WAM executor performs world-aware action generation for each instruction or subtask. The executor is trained with action prediction and video co-training, but inference directly predicts action chunks without explicit future video generation. To make this execution path practical on real robots, we further integrate TensorRT acceleration, asynchronous execution, and real-time chunking (RTC) so that policy queries do not block robot control. To provide a fair real-robot comparison with VLA policies, we build and evaluate DSWAM under the DeMaVLA real-world deformable manipulation setting with matched robot platform, pretraining data, post-training data, and evaluation criteria.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 29 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.
Builds on
29 of 29 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 Apr
- 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
- 2026StarVLA: A Lego-like Codebase for Vision-Language-Action Model Developing6 Apr
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
- 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
Other references · 20
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
- 2024PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfercited by 679
- 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 643
- 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 477
- 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 285
- 2025π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experiencecited by 280
8 more
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 274
- 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 199
- 2025GR-3 Technical Reportcited by 110
- 2026A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Modelcited by 97
- 2026ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learningcited by 94
- 2025Galaxea Open-World Dataset and G0 Dual-System VLA Modelcited by 90
- 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-0: An Open-Sourced Vision-Language-Action Model with Real-Time Executioncited by 42
- 2026DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulationcited by 8
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026WorldScape Policy 2.0: Empowering Steerable World Action Modeling with Reasoning-Augmented Memory and In-Context Learningcited by 4
- 2026SG-WAM: Text-Grounded and Spatial-aware Semantic Guidance for World-Action Modelscited by 2
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026CSWAM: Better Causal Semantic Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in World Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026MaskHarness-WAM: Instance-Grounded Harnessing for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026JEPA-WAM: Connecting Generated Visual Instructions to World Action Models through JEPA Latent Representationscited by 0
- 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinementcited by 0
- 2026DualManip: Agentic Dynamic Manipulation via Dual-Path Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Adaptationcited by 0
- 2026DualManip: Agentic Dynamic Manipulation via Dual-Path Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Adaptation25 Sep 2026
- 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement21 Sep 2026
- 2026MaskHarness-WAM: Instance-Grounded Harnessing for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation17 Sep 2026
- 2026CSWAM: Better Causal Semantic Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in World Action Models16 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Models6 Sep 2026
- 2026SG-WAM: Text-Grounded and Spatial-aware Semantic Guidance for World-Action Models9 Aug 2026
- 2026JEPA-WAM: Connecting Generated Visual Instructions to World Action Models through JEPA Latent Representations4 Aug 2026
- 2026WorldScape Policy 2.0: Empowering Steerable World Action Modeling with Reasoning-Augmented Memory and In-Context Learning21 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Scaling World Model for Hierarchical Manipulation Policies
- 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey
- 2025HAMSTER: Hierarchical Action Models For Open-World Robot Manipulation
- 2026Beyond Task Success: Behavioral and Representational Diagnostics for WAM and VLA
- 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026Coarse-to-Control: Action-Token Planning for Vision-Language-Action Models
- 2024IRASim: A Fine-Grained World Model for Robot Manipulation