mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models

arXiv 2608.11605 ↗First posted 12 Aug 2026cs.AIcited by 4

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) connect visual prediction with robot control, but supplying predictive context often requires expensive future-video generation. Direct policies avoid this cost but lack an explicit interface for accessing future-indexed predictive information. We introduce ForeWAM, a World Action Model that separates forecasting from rendering to expose and shape latent predictive context for efficient control. Its core mechanism, Future-KV, performs a single Video DiT prefill over the current visual latent and noise-initialized future slots, then reuses the resulting key-value states throughout action denoising. To make this context relevant to control, we introduce dynamics registers supervised by latent actions from a frozen teacher during training, encouraging representations of interaction-induced transitions. This reusable context supports a lightweight, single-layer action decoder. We evaluate ForeWAM on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboCasa, and real-world manipulation tasks. Without additional policy-level embodied pretraining, ForeWAM improves RoboCasa success by 9.7 percentage points over Fast-WAM at the same budget of 50 demonstrations per task, reaching 59.2%. With a single-layer decoder, it achieves 77.6% success on LIBERO-Plus and reduces policy-query latency to 88.7 ms on an NVIDIA A800, delivering a 6.27-fold speedup over Fast-WAM. These results show that latent predictive computation provides useful foresight for robust, efficient control without explicit future-video generation.

Key facts. Cited by 4 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 59 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

Builds on

59 of 63 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Robust-WAM: Bridging Generative Pretraining and Semantic Foresight in World-Action Models6 Aug
  2. 2026Enfold: Folding World Model Imagination into Predictive Representations for Ultra-Efficient Embodied Control29 Jul
  3. 2026LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies14 Jun
  4. 2026Mask World Model: Predicting What Matters for Robust Robot Policy Learning21 Apr
  5. 2026World-Value-Action Model: Implicit Planning for Vision-Language-Action Systems16 Apr
  6. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
  7. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  8. 2026AdaWorldPolicy: World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning for Robotic Manipulation23 Feb
  9. 2026FRAPPE: Infusing World Modeling into Generalist Policies via Multiple Future Representation Alignment19 Feb
  10. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  11. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
  12. 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
7 more
  1. 2025Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model31 Oct
  2. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model26 Jun
  3. 20253DFlowAction: Learning Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from 3D Flow World Model6 Jun
  4. 2025FLARE: Robot Learning with Implicit World Modeling21 May
  5. 2025DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models19 May
  6. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
  7. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 40

  1. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  2. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  4. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  6. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,007
  7. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  8. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,427
  9. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,338
  10. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
  11. 2024RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 670
  12. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 643
28 more
  1. 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 506
  2. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 440
  3. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 386
  4. 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 353
  5. 2024GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulationcited by 290
  6. 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 285
  7. 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 279
  8. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 278
  9. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 274
  10. 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 195
  11. 2023Video Language Planningcited by 160
  12. 2023Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondencescited by 159
  13. 2026π0.7: a Steerable Generalist Robotic Foundation Model with Emergent Capabilitiescited by 127
  14. 2024Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interfacecited by 126
  15. 2024Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 116
  16. 2026ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learningcited by 94
  17. 2024One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillationcited by 83
  18. 2026DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 71
  19. 2025CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsificationcited by 70
  20. 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Processcited by 64
  21. 2025VideoVLA: Video Generators Can Be Generalizable Robot Manipulatorscited by 61
  22. 2026LDA-1B: Scaling Latent Dynamics Action Model via Universal Embodied Data Ingestioncited by 46
  23. 2024A Dual Process VLA: Efficient Robotic Manipulation Leveraging VLMcited by 44
  24. 2025Unified Diffusion VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model via Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Processcited by 37
  25. 2026S-VAM: Shortcut Video-Action Model by Self-Distilling Geometric and Semantic Foresightcited by 16
  26. 2024ARDuP: Active Region Video Diffusion for Universal Policiescited by 10
  27. 2025CoVAR: Co-generation of Video and Action for Robotic Manipulation via Multi-Modal Diffusioncited by 9
  28. 2026Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AIcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026CtrlWAM: Controllable World Action Models with Aligned Intent and Foresight
  2. 2026MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models
  3. 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
  4. 2026DeltaWAM: Distilling Action Tangent Fields into World Action Models
  5. 2026From World Models to World Action Models: Rethinking Next-State Prediction
  6. 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement
  7. 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
  8. 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation