SG-WAM: Self-Guided World Modeling in Geometry-Aware Policy Space
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with prediction of future states. Their effectiveness depends on whether future dynamics are modeled in a space that is both aligned with action generation and sufficiently geometry-aware to capture where and how actions change the scene. Existing WAMs typically satisfy only part of this requirement, relying on either perceptually heavy observation-space targets or auxiliary latent spaces that are not jointly structured for action relevance and geometry. We propose SG-WAM, a self-guided framework that learns geometry-aware action-conditioned dynamics directly in the policy-derived representation space. SG-WAM introduces learnable dynamics tokens and a Self-Guided World Predictor that forecasts their future latent states conditioned on intervening robot actions. Prediction targets are generated by an exponential moving average copy of the same policy backbone, providing stable supervision within the representation family used by the action expert. Geometric supervision further structures the policy image-token representations, providing spatially grounded context for the dynamics tokens and yielding a future-alignment space that is both action-relevant and geometry-aware. Latent future prediction, geometric grounding, and flow-matching action generation are jointly optimized end-to-end in a unified framework. Built on a 0.9B model without large-scale embodied pretraining, SG-WAM achieves 98.5% average success on LIBERO and 73% on LIBERO-Plus, while outperforming strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-world evaluations.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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 49 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2026.
Builds on
49 of 50 references.
Closest ancestors · 21
Same direction, newest first
- 2026LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies14 Jun
- 2026GEM-4D: Geometry-Enhanced Video World Models for Robot Manipulation20 May
- 2026Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos30 Apr
- 2026STARRY: Spatial-Temporal Action-Centric World Modeling for Robotic Manipulation29 Apr
- 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
- 2026DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA31 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation25 Feb
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Scaling World Model for Hierarchical Manipulation Policies11 Feb
- 2026VLA-JEPA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Model with Latent World Model10 Feb
- 2026MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation10 Feb
9 more
- 2026DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos6 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
- 2025villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models31 Jul
- 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
- 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
- 20253DFlowAction: Learning Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from 3D Flow World Model6 Jun
- 2025TesserAct: Learning 4D Embodied World Models29 Apr
- 2024IRASim: A Fine-Grained World Model for Robot Manipulation20 Jun
Other references · 28
- 2020Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learningcited by 4,712
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 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
- 2025VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 1,475
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
- 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
- 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 643
- 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 506
- 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 386
- 2024Latent Action Pretraining from Videoscited by 302
- 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 279
16 more
- 2026LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixelscited by 237
- 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 203
- 2023Video Language Planningcited by 160
- 2023Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondencescited by 159
- 2026Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 146
- 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 142
- 2026Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexitycited by 142
- 2024Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interfacecited by 126
- 2025Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Modelcited by 125
- 2024Moto: Latent Motion Token as the Bridging Language for Learning Robot Manipulation from Videoscited by 65
- 2026LDA-1B: Scaling Latent Dynamics Action Model via Universal Embodied Data Ingestioncited by 46
- 2025From Spatial to Actions: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Model in Spatial Foundation Priorscited by 25
- 2025OmniVGGT: Omni-Modality Driven Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 17
- 2025RoboEnvision: A Long-Horizon Video Generation Model for Multi-Task Robot Manipulationcited by 16
- 2026FD-VLA: Force-Distilled Vision-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 15
- 2025Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresightcited by 12
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulation29 Sep 2026
- 2026CogWAM: Aligning Semantic Cognition with World Action Modeling via Event-Driven Interfaces29 Sep 2026
- 2026MT-WAM: Reorienting the One-Pass Predictive Representation Toward Action Generation18 Sep 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion
- 2026DeltaWAM: Distilling Action Tangent Fields into World Action Models
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model
- 2026GeoSem-WAM: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware World Action Models
- 2026ACG-WAM: World-Action Modeling via Action-Conditioned Geometric Latent Prediction
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch
- 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models
- 2026Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling