mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SelfWAM: A Self-Grounded Unified World Action Model for Fast Robot Control

arXiv 2608.00725 ↗First posted 1 Aug 2026cs.ROcited by 8

On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by jointly modeling actions and future observations. However, conditioning future prediction only on the task prompt and observation context risks capturing generic task progression rather than the action-specific consequences of the executed action. We introduce SelfWAM, a unified self-grounded WAM built on a modality-specialized Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that jointly predicts actions, action-conditioned future RGB frames, and robot self-masks, thereby grounding future prediction in the robot's visible body and its action-induced motion. During joint training, SelfWAM allows future visual queries to attend to a clean copy of the demonstrated action, turning the video branch into an action-specific consequence model while leaving the fast action-only inference path unchanged. To focus video learning on action-relevant visual changes, we use prompt-specific objectives for future robot self-mask prediction, which removes appearance details and provides a target whose temporal evolution is tightly coupled with the conditioning action. Together, clean-action conditioning and future self-mask supervision make future predictions more directly reflect how the executed action changes the robot's visible motion and the surrounding scene. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks show that SelfWAM produces more action-sensitive futures and preserves fast policy inference, while improving policy performance.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 7 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

Builds on

7 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026GeoSem-WAM: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware World Action Models2 Jun
  2. 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation31 May
  3. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan

Other references · 4

  1. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  2. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  3. 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,234
  4. 2026WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Modelscited by 76

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch
  2. 2026MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models
  3. 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
  4. 2026Faster-WAM: Efficient Inference-Time Future Conditioning for Robust World Action Models
  5. 2026MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models
  6. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model
  7. 2026DC-WAM: Dynamic-Centric Visual Supervision and Reasoning for World-Action Models
  8. 2026Long-WAM: Scaling the Context of World-Action Models