mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

4D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields

arXiv 2608.08023 ↗First posted 8 Aug 2026cs.ROcited by 9

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Building on recent advances in world models, World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model video prediction and action generation. However, they typically represent videos in 2D pixel space, creating a representation gap with 3D space in which robotic actions are executed. Recent 3D approaches introduce 3D information, but fail to fully exploit the dynamics of 3D structures. In this work, we propose 4D-WAM, a model-agnostic training strategy that injects spatiotemporal knowledge from 3D trajectory fields into WAMs through representation alignment. To this end, we introduce two complementary objectives: 1) motion alignment, which aligns temporal feature variations across adjacent frames and encourages the model to build local 4D awareness during training, and 2) destination alignment, which guides the model to infer the final destination from the source frame by minimizing the gap between their attention-like similarity distributions. Together, these objectives provide both local motion supervision and long-horizon goal guidance, enabling WAMs to learn trajectory-level spatiotemporal representations. Extensive in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments across different base models demonstrate the model's improvements in spatial understanding, execution precision, robustness, generalization, and versatility.

Key facts. Cited by 9 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 24 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2026.

Builds on

24 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026RynnWorld-4D: 4D Embodied World Models for Robotic Manipulation7 Jul
  2. 2026Learning 4D Geometric Priors for Inference-Efficient World Action Models6 Jul
  3. 2026WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens12 Jun
  4. 2026μ0: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model11 Jun
  5. 2026Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising29 Apr
  6. 2026Action Images: End-to-End Policy Learning via Multiview Video Generation7 Apr
  7. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  8. 2026FRAPPE: Infusing World Modeling into Generalist Policies via Multiple Future Representation Alignment19 Feb
  9. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  10. 2026PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation7 Jan
  11. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  12. 2025TesserAct: Learning 4D Embodied World Models29 Apr
1 more
  1. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr

Other references · 11

  1. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,193
  2. 2018Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labelscited by 994
  3. 2024Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Thinkcited by 666
  4. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 477
  5. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 278
  6. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 274
  7. 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 133
  8. 2025Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Modelcited by 125
  9. 2026SANA-WM: Efficient Minute-Scale World Modeling with Hybrid Linear Diffusion Transformercited by 50
  10. 2026Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Modelscited by 47
  11. 2025Unified Diffusion VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model via Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Processcited by 37

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion
  2. 2026GeoSem-WAM: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware World Action Models
  3. 2026MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulation
  4. 2026EA-WM: Event-Aware Generative World Model with Structured Kinematic-to-Visual Action Fields
  5. 2026GaussianWAM: Distilling Geometry and Semantics from 3D Gaussian Fields into World-Action Models
  6. 20264D-WAM: 4D Consistent World Modeling for Autonomous Driving
  7. 2026LD4WAM: Learning Latent Dynamics from Human Videos for World Action Models
  8. 2026DC-WAM: Dynamic-Centric Visual Supervision and Reasoning for World-Action Models