mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

World-Coherent Decoding: Self-Verifying Test-Time Planning for World Action Models

arXiv 2609.02159 ↗First posted 2 Sep 2026cs.CVcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) aim to control robots by stochastically generating visual futures and then decoding actions, but empirical observations indicate that the results can strongly depend on which future is selected. We propose World-Coherent-Decoding (WCD), a self-verifying test-time planning framework that treats WAM rollouts as falsifiable future--action hypotheses. At each decision step, WCD samples multiple candidates from a frozen WAM and ranks them using internal generative signals: flow-based video surprisal for visual plausibility and action path effort for action-generation stability. After execution, the realized observation audits the selected imagination, yielding an imagination--reality mismatch that trains a lightweight online predictor for future candidate selection. Thus, WCD converts delayed self-verification into pre-execution reliability estimation without updating the backbone model. On RoboTwin 2.0, WCD improves Hard success under limited randomized-scene supervision from 55.80% to 60.90%, with a +16.43 gains on Horizon-3 tasks, and shows qualitative robustness on real Franka visual-shift tests. These results highlight a simple principle: test-time scaling for WAMs depends less on sampling more futures than on selecting reliable ones.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

Builds on

21 of 31 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
  2. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  3. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
  4. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model15 Dec
  5. 2024Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation19 Dec

Other references · 16

  1. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  2. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  3. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  4. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  5. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
  6. 2018FFJORD: Free-form Continuous Dynamics for Scalable Reversible Generative Modelscited by 594
  7. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 562
  8. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
  9. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
  10. 2018Visual Foresight: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Controlcited by 230
  11. 2024Steering Your Generalists: Improving Robotic Foundation Models via Value Guidancecited by 106
  12. 2025RoboMonkey: Scaling Test-Time Sampling and Verification for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 61
4 more
  1. 2015Learning Visual Predictive Models of Physics for Playing Billiardscited by 58
  2. 2024Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Samplingcited by 52
  3. 2025Noise Hypernetworks: Amortizing Test-Time Compute in Diffusion Modelscited by 35
  4. 2025Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 23

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026When to Trust Imagination: Adaptive Action Execution for World Action Models
  2. 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
  3. 2026Latent Action as Intention Enables Efficient Future Imagination for World Action Models
  4. 2026GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models
  5. 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement
  6. 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models
  7. 2026Faster-WAM: Efficient Inference-Time Future Conditioning for Robust World Action Models
  8. 2026DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation