N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
We present N0-TWAM, a tactile-native world-action model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts both future vision and future contact. To our knowledge, it is the first tactile world-action model trained at large scale, and it shows strong capability on contact-rich tasks. We pre-train N0-TWAM at large scale with visuo-tactile joint training over tactile-rich demonstrations spanning six embodiments and 450 tasks. We use NeoForce, a unified force-based tactile representation, to form a physically grounded contact signal that conditions action generation. To improve long-horizon and multi-stage manipulation, we introduce tactile contact events for task staging and advance through them during execution. For real-time efficiency, we adopt an asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that pairs a full-width expert for video prediction with slim experts for downstream action and tactile prediction. Evaluations on both real and simulated benchmarks justify the capabilities of N0-TWAM across a range of contact-rich tasks, and demonstrate the benefit of data scaling for precise tactile and action prediction. In summary, N0-TWAM endows a world-action model with predictive capabilities to foresee vision, touch and action, building a solid foundation for fine-grained manipulation on open contact-rich tasks. The codebase and model checkpoints will be made publicly available to foster further research and development in tactile-enabled robotic manipulation.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 57 of its 97 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2026.
Builds on
57 of 97 references.
Closest ancestors · 20
Same direction, newest first
- 2026VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation2 Jul
- 2026Tactile-WAM: Touch-Aware World Action Model with Tactile Asymmetric Attention25 Jun
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation11 Jun
- 2026RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers11 Jun
- 2026TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation9 Jun
- 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination8 Jun
- 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation7 Jun
- 2026Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models3 Jun
- 2026WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints1 Jun
- 2026Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos30 Apr
- 2026VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs24 Mar
- 2026OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation19 Mar
8 more
- 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
- 2026Visuo-Tactile World Models5 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
- 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
- 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
Other references · 37
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,857
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,610
- 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,321
- 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,186
- 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 848
- 2023GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 627
- 2024GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulationcited by 293
- 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 292
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 289
- 2024VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Taskscited by 172
- 2026InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulationcited by 49
- 2025TLA: Tactile-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 47
25 more
- 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-0: An Open-Sourced Vision-Language-Action Model with Real-Time Executioncited by 44
- 2025ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulationcited by 38
- 2025VLA-Touch: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Dual-Level Tactile Feedbackcited by 38
- 2024Adaptive Compliance Policy: Learning Approximate Compliance for Diffusion Guided Controlcited by 37
- 2026RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policiescited by 37
- 2026StarVLA-α: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systemscited by 29
- 2026From Foundation to Application: Improving VLA Models in Practicecited by 26
- 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectoriescited by 26
- 2025CronusVLA: Towards Efficient and Robust Manipulation via Multi-Frame Vision-Language-Action Modelingcited by 24
- 2025Tactile-VLA: Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Model's Physical Knowledge for Tactile Generalizationcited by 19
- 2026InternVLA-A1.5: Unifying Understanding, Latent Foresight, and Action for Compositional Generalizationcited by 19
- 2026UniVTAC: A Unified Simulation Platform for Visuo-Tactile Manipulation Data Generation, Learning, and Benchmarkingcited by 18
- 2026HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agentscited by 18
- 2025Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 17
- 2026S-VAM: Shortcut Video-Action Model by Self-Distilling Geometric and Semantic Foresightcited by 17
- 2026Next Forcing: Causal World Modeling with Multi-Chunk Predictioncited by 17
- 2026Scaling Mixture-of-Experts Video Pretraining for Embodied Intelligencecited by 15
- 2025Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulationcited by 14
- 2026FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 13
- 2026TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidancecited by 12
- 2026T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulationcited by 12
- 2026Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigationcited by 10
- 2025ManipForce: Force-Guided Policy Learning with Frequency-Aware Representation for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 9
- 2026Fast-dVLA: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion VLA to Real-Time Performancecited by 9
- 2026Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agentscited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2026DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation
- 2026TacWAM: Anchor-Guided World Action Model with Mechanics-Aware Tactile Prediction
- 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2026ReTouch: Empowering Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation with Online-Refined Tactile Prediction
- 2026τ: Learning Touch-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models from Future Visual Supervision
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control