MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World action models (WAMs) built on video generation backbones are a rising recipe for robot learning, yet remain confined to tabletop manipulation. Mobile manipulation demands simultaneous locomotion and whole-body manipulation amid scene-scale dynamics, yet is still dominated by dynamics-blind visual encoders with hand-crafted coordination. We bridge this gap with MobileWAM, a mixture-of-transformers architecture that fuses a pretrained video diffusion transformer with a lightweight action expert through layerwise joint attention, translating internet-scale motion priors into whole-body control. To reconcile the heterogeneous dynamics of moving and manipulating, each feed-forward layer of the action expert becomes a three-expert mixture of shared, locomotion, and manipulation experts, softly routed by the motion intent in the action tokens. To densify supervision, we further propose Chain-of-Foresight (CoF): intermediate representations sequentially predict a chain of future latent chunks, each step conditioned on its predecessor. CoF pairs naturally with our decoupled video--action denoising scheme. At deployment, the WAM serves as a pure current-frame encoder; foresight acts only through gradients, so at inference the foresight chain and video generation are discarded, leaving only policy-level cost. MobileWAM surpasses state-of-the-art mobile manipulation policies on ManiSkill-HAB and fine-tunes to a real ARX Lift2 mobile manipulator across diverse tasks with strong generalization. Code will be released soon.
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 18 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.
Builds on
18 of 49 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2026ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model1 Jul
- 2026ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?17 Jun
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
Other references · 13
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
- 2024ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AIcited by 216
- 2025ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceivercited by 80
- 2025Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Modelscited by 29
- 2026DualCoT-VLA: Visual-Linguistic Chain of Thought via Parallel Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 20
- 2026S-VAM: Shortcut Video-Action Model by Self-Distilling Geometric and Semantic Foresightcited by 16
- 2025EchoVLA: Robotic Vision-Language-Action Model with Synergistic Declarative Memory for Mobile Manipulationcited by 15
- 2025DSPv2: Improved Dense Policy for Effective and Generalizable Whole-body Mobile Manipulationcited by 8
- 2026SG-VLA: Learning Spatially-Grounded Vision-Language-Action Models for Mobile Manipulationcited by 8
- 2025MoMaGen: Generating Demonstrations under Soft and Hard Constraints for Multi-Step Bimanual Mobile Manipulationcited by 7
- 2026AnchorVLA: Anchored Diffusion for Efficient End-to-End Mobile Manipulationcited by 2
1 more
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026DECOWAM: Decoupled Whole-Body World-Action Model for Legged Mobile Manipulation
- 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
- 2025MoWM: Mixture-of-World-Models for Embodied Planning via Latent-to-Pixel Feature Modulation
- 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
- 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imagination
- 2026MotionWAM: Towards Foundation World Action Models for Real-Time Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
- 2026HarmoWAM: Harmonizing Generalizable and Precise Manipulation via Adaptive World Action Models