# RISE: Adaptive Imagination for World Action Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20430 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20430/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17080/) (2023)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04983/) (2024)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16163/) (2026)
- [LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19312/) (2026)
- [DriveDreamer: Towards Real-world-driven World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09777/) (2023)
- [Unified Video Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00200/) (2025)
- [Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08481/) (2024)
- [DriveVLA-W0: World Models Amplify Data Scaling Law in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12796/) (2025)
- [DrivingGPT: Unifying Driving World Modeling and Planning with Multi-modal Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18607/) (2024)
- [Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12820/) (2025)
- [VL-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10942/) (2025)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27792/) (2026)
- [World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12090/) (2026)
- [DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23421/) (2025)
- [DriveDPO: Policy Learning via Safety DPO For End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17940/) (2025)
- [From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19654/) (2025)
- [Latent-WAM: Latent World Action Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24581/) (2026)
- [Drive-JEPA: Video JEPA Meets Multimodal Trajectory Distillation for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22032/) (2026)
- [UniFuture: A 4D Driving World Model for Future Generation and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13587/) (2025)
- [DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09701/) (2026)
- [DreamerAD: Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Latent World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24587/) (2026)
- [EponaV2: Driving World Model with Comprehensive Future Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14696/) (2026)
- [World-Language-Action Model for Unified World Modeling, Language Reasoning, and Action Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05979/) (2026)
- [World Action Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20781/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Rethinking World Models for Safety-Critical Embodied Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03774/) (2026)
- [When Should a World Model Move? Loss-Conditioned State Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15801/) (2026)
- [DroneWAM: Efficient World Action Model for Drone Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33148/) (2026)
- [MORE: Learning Motion-Oriented Registers for Driving World Models and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14871/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) improve planning by incorporating future world evolution into action generation, yet existing methods allocate a fixed imagination budget to every scene. We propose RISE (Refining Imagination through SElective Rollout), a system-level adaptive imagination framework that makes sequential textscRoll/textscStop decisions according to the expected planning benefit of continued rollout. At each step, a Latent Evaluator estimates the risk revealed by the current prefix and how much planning could improve if imagination continues, while a Rollout Gate weighs this expected benefit against additional computation cost. Since factual driving logs expose only one realized future, we further construct CounterDrive, a counterfactual dataset with diverse outcomes and risk levels, to enrich future dynamics and provide localized risk supervision. Each retained sample undergoes expert verification and annotation of trajectory validity, incident onset, and causal category, providing a reusable resource for safety-critical world-modeling research. Experiments on NAVSIM and nuScenes show that RISE achieves the best overall planning performance while reducing unnecessary rollout, with additional transfer results supporting its plug-in generality across WAM architectures.