mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation

arXiv 2608.03244 ↗First posted 4 Aug 2026cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: World models → World models for navigation

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Abstract (arXiv)

Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts. We present UniNav, a unified world-action model that generates future visual observations and continuous waypoint trajectories through a single diffusion process. Given history frames and a goal image, UniNav jointly denoises visual and waypoint tokens within a single transformer, unifying future prediction and action generation in a shared framework. To improve spatial grounding, we incorporate geometry-aware camera tokens. We also train on both trajectory-labeled navigation data and video-only data, enabling the model to benefit from diverse videos without waypoint annotations. Based on this unified framework, we introduce two variants: UniNav-Full jointly predicts interpretable future observations and their corresponding trajectories, while UniNav-Fast removes future-image tokens at inference for efficient trajectory prediction. Experiments on navigation benchmarks show that UniNav outperforms the strongest baseline in ATE across all datasets. With one-step inference, UniNav-Fast achieves a latency of 0.1s without a substantial accuracy drop. Code will be released.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for navigation, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 32 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

Builds on

32 of 52 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026WAM-Nav: Asymmetric Latent World-Action Modeling for Unified Visual Navigation3 Jun
  2. 2026RAE-NWM: Navigation World Model in Dense Visual Representation Space10 Mar
  3. 2026MWM: Mobile World Models for Action-Conditioned Consistent Prediction8 Mar
  4. 2025Efficient Image-Goal Navigation with Representative Latent World Model14 Nov
  5. 2025Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresight9 Oct

Other references · 27

  1. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
  2. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  3. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  4. 2017Decoupled Weight Decay Regularizationcited by 1,831
  5. 2025Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Viewscited by 692
  6. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policiescited by 465
  7. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?cited by 349
  8. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Controlcited by 321
  9. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
  10. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasetscited by 240
  11. 2023ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigationcited by 222
  12. 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 205
15 more
  1. 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
  2. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Modelcited by 139
  3. 2025Genie Envisioner: A Unified World Foundation Platform for Robotic Manipulationcited by 137
  4. 2021Rapid Exploration for Open-World Navigation with Latent Goal Modelscited by 121
  5. 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoisingcited by 71
  6. 2025NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidancecited by 49
  7. 2026VGGT-Omegacited by 26
  8. 2026Light-WAM: Efficient World Action Models with State-Fusion Action Decodingcited by 23
  9. 2026AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Mapscited by 12
  10. 2026Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigationcited by 11
  11. 2026NavDreamer: Video Models as Zero-Shot 3D Navigatorscited by 9
  12. 2026SpatialVAM:Spatial-Aware Multi-View Video Diffusion as a Data-Efficient Robot Policycited by 8
  13. 2025LoGoPlanner: Localization Grounded Navigation Policy with Metric-aware Visual Geometrycited by 6
  14. 2026Planning in 8 Tokens: A Compact Discrete Tokenizer for Latent World Modelcited by 6
  15. 2024A Landmark-Aware Visual Navigation Datasetcited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025AstraNav-World: World Model for Foresight Control and Consistency
  2. 2024Navigation World Models
  3. 2026FutureNav: Unified World-Action Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation
  4. 2026NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation
  5. 2026Pondering the Way: Spatial-perceiving World Action Model for Embodied Navigation
  6. 2026NavWM: A Unified Navigation World Model for Foresight-Driven Planning
  7. 2026G2WAM: World Action Models for Efficient and Geometry Grounded Image-Goal Navigation
  8. 2026SkipWorld: Latent Skip Planning with Distilled World Models for Efficient Visual Navigation