mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Decoupling Intention from Trajectory: A Representational Deduction Framework for World Action Models

arXiv 2608.06994 ↗First posted 7 Aug 2026cs.RO cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) aim to construct a unified architecture capable of understanding world state evolution and guiding to generative motion planning. However, existing visual branches focus on predicting static visual observation, rather than reflecting potential transition information that captures the evolution of world states under motion interactions. This leads to representational entanglement between high-level physical condition evolution and low-level action trajectory generation within the Action Model, creating a structural bottleneck while weakening the predictive capability of world evolution modeling for action generation. We propose PILOT (Physical Inference for Latent Optimized Trajectories), whose core Representational Deduction (RD) bridges this gap by integrating motion thought-of-chain (CoT) guidance as a native model capability. Specifically, RD aims to encourage the action branch to explicitly model potential state transition tokens, which are retained as CoT in the reasoning space to guide fine-grained motion trajectory. Experiments demonstrate that RD not only significantly improves the success rate and generalization ability of WAMs in complex robotic manipulation tasks but also enhances the model's physical interpretability by decoupling high-level motion semantics from low-level trajectory details. Furthermore, the abundant state transition supervision signals introduced by RD effectively alleviate the sparse supervision in action generation, enabling it to serve as an efficient few-shot real-robot fine-tuning strategy and demonstrating superior scalability for migration to mainstream WAM architectures.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 71 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2026.

Builds on

71 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 20

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  1. 2026ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?17 Jun
  2. 2026LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies14 Jun
  3. 2026WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints1 Jun
  4. 2026Reconstruction or Semantics? What Makes a Latent Space Useful for Robotic World Models7 May
  5. 2026Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos30 Apr
  6. 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 Apr
  7. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  8. 2026World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation25 Feb
  9. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  10. 2026VLA-JEPA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Model with Latent World Model10 Feb
  11. 2026DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos6 Feb
  12. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
8 more
  1. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
  2. 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
  3. 2025villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models31 Jul
  4. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  5. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
  6. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
  7. 2024Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning11 Jul
  8. 2024RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination18 Apr

Other references · 51

  1. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,137
  2. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  4. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  6. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
  7. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
  8. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,253
  9. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
  10. 2021Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attentioncited by 1,104
  11. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 883
  12. 2023Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transportcited by 879
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  1. 2024Genie: Generative Interactive Environmentscited by 747
  2. 2024RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 691
  3. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 665
  4. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spacescited by 611
  5. 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 519
  6. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 410
  7. 2024Latent Action Pretraining from Videoscited by 321
  8. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 303
  9. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
  10. 2026LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixelscited by 273
  11. 2025DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledgecited by 213
  12. 2024Scaling Proprioceptive-Visual Learning with Heterogeneous Pre-trained Transformerscited by 148
  13. 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
  14. 2025Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Modelcited by 134
  15. 2026V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learningcited by 117
  16. 2025F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actionscited by 86
  17. 2026DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 76
  18. 2025CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsificationcited by 74
  19. 2024Moto: Latent Motion Token as the Bridging Language for Learning Robot Manipulation from Videoscited by 69
  20. 2025Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulationcited by 62
  21. 2026LDA-1B: Scaling Latent Dynamics Action Model via Universal Embodied Data Ingestioncited by 52
  22. 2025CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learningcited by 40
  23. 2024Mirage: Cross-Embodiment Zero-Shot Policy Transfer with Cross-Paintingcited by 36
  24. 2026CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videoscited by 31
  25. 2026StarVLA-α: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systemscited by 31
  26. 2026LangForce: Bayesian Decomposition of Vision Language Action Models via Latent Action Queriescited by 27
  27. 2025GeoAware-VLA: Implicit Geometry Aware Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 26
  28. 2025ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actionscited by 26
  29. 2026VP-VLA: Visual Prompting as an Interface for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 17
  30. 2025XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representationscited by 15
  31. 2025Unifying Perception and Action: A Hybrid-Modality Pipeline with Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Robotic Action Generationcited by 14
  32. 2026Disentangled Robot Learning via Separate Forward and Inverse Dynamics Pretrainingcited by 14
  33. 2025Learning Diffusion Models with Flexible Representation Guidancecited by 13
  34. 2025Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresightcited by 13
  35. 2025PhysBrain: Human Egocentric Data as a Bridge from Vision Language Models to Physical Intelligencecited by 11
  36. 2026ROCKET: Residual-Oriented Multi-Layer Alignment for Spatially-Aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 11
  37. 2026From Reaction to Anticipation: Proactive Failure Recovery through Agentic Task Graph for Robotic Manipulationcited by 7
  38. 2026PokeVLA: Empowering Pocket-Sized Vision-Language-Action Model with Comprehensive World Knowledge Guidancecited by 6

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  2. 2026Magic-W0: A Structured World-Action Foundation Model for Physical Intelligence
  3. 2026Box-WAM: Box Trajectories as Compact State Representations for World Action Models
  4. 2026AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps
  5. 2026EV-WM: Event-Verified World Models for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2026Representation World Model: Learning States, Transition and Executable Plans in Representation
  7. 2026H-WM: Robotic Task and Motion Planning Guided by Hierarchical World Model
  8. 2026The Planning Limits of Latent World Models