mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ZimaBlue: Evolving Generalizable World Action Models through Scalable Video Pre-training

arXiv 2609.00188 ↗First posted 31 Aug 2026cs.CVcited by 4

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation faces a fundamental scaling challenge: robust generalization demands broad physical experience, yet action-labeled robot trajectories are expensive to collect and inherently limited in diversity. Egocentric videos offer a far more scalable source of embodied experience, capturing object interactions, contact dynamics, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors across diverse environments. The central challenge is how to convert this abundant but action-free experience into effective robot control. We introduce ZimaBlue, a scalable framework for learning generalizable World Action Models (WAMs) from large-scale video. ZimaBlue follows a three-stage training curriculum: it first performs causal embodied video pre-training on large-scale human and robot egocentric videos, then grounds the learned visual dynamics in heterogeneous robot trajectories through video-action mid-training with a unified action representation, and finally specializes the model to a target robot for deployment. To make generative WAMs practical for real-time control, ZimaBluefurther adopts an asynchronous Slow-Fast dual-system architecture, where a high-capacity Slow world model provides generalizable spatiotemporal representations and a lightweight Fast branch enables 30 Hz action prediction on NVIDIA RTX 4090. On real-robot zero-shot evaluations, scaling from target-robot data alone to over 120,000 hours of embodied video improves success from 36.1% to 77.8%. ZimaBlue further delivers strong performance across multiple benchmarks, with particularly pronounced gains on unseen tasks.

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 46 of its 82 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

Builds on

46 of 82 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models14 Jul
  2. 2026ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model1 Jul
  3. 2026ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?17 Jun
  4. 2026AHA-WAM:Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Modeling with Observation-Guided Context Routing8 Jun
  5. 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 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. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  9. 2026DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos6 Feb
  10. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
  11. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun
  12. 2024RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination18 Apr

Other references · 34

  1. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  2. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  3. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  4. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,253
  5. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
  6. 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasetcited by 852
  7. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 750
  8. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
  9. 2025AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systemscited by 405
  10. 2024Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robotscited by 394
  11. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 303
  12. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
22 more
  1. 2024RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulationcited by 175
  2. 2026ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learningcited by 103
  3. 2026EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Datacited by 94
  4. 2025Galaxea Open-World Dataset and G0 Dual-System VLA Modelcited by 92
  5. 2024WorldDreamer: Towards General World Models for Video Generation via Predicting Masked Tokenscited by 89
  6. 2025Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical Worldcited by 83
  7. 2025RoboCOIN: An Open-Sourced Bimanual Robotic Data Collection for Integrated Manipulationcited by 78
  8. 2026InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulationcited by 50
  9. 2026Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Modelscited by 50
  10. 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-0: An Open-Sourced Vision-Language-Action Model with Real-Time Executioncited by 45
  11. 2026Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodimentscited by 44
  12. 2026Native Video-Action Pretraining for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 36
  13. 2025Fast-in-Slow: A Dual-System Foundation Model Unifying Fast Manipulation within Slow Reasoningcited by 31
  14. 2026StarVLA-α: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systemscited by 31
  15. 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectoriescited by 29
  16. 2026RLDX-1 Technical Reportcited by 28
  17. 2026InternVLA-A1.5: Unifying Understanding, Latent Foresight, and Action for Compositional Generalizationcited by 20
  18. 2026HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation Systemcited by 8
  19. 2026Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 6
  20. 2026GlobalWasteData: A Large-Scale, Integrated Dataset for Robust Waste Classification and Environmental Monitoringcited by 2
  21. 2026CAC-VLA: Context-Gated Action Conditioning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 2
  22. 2025A Semantic Parsing Framework for End-to-End Time Normalizationcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
  2. 2026GeniWorld: A Generalizable Interactive World Model for Robotic Manipulation via Visual Actions
  3. 2026From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data
  4. 2025Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulation
  5. 2026JoyAI-RA 0.5: Scaling Robot Manipulation Learning via Dual Action Alignment
  6. 2024Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation
  7. 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
  8. 2026AnyWorld: Factorized Egocentric World Models for Cross-Embodiment Generalization