TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World-action models guide action generation with predicted future observations, but vision-centric predictions miss the local contact cues that decide contact-rich manipulation. However, naively predicting future tactile observations as additional views recovers only a third of the achievable gain in our experiments. This gap reflects a timing mismatch: predictions precede execution, while tactile feedback arrives during it. We introduce TacPAC, which turns tactile prediction into real-time action correction. Once the base model has planned an action chunk, TacPAC caches the predicted contact that plan was conditioned on together with the plan's own representation, and a tactile expert reads each newly observed tactile image against that cache to correct the actions not yet executed. Feedback is thus interpreted against what the plan anticipated rather than in isolation, and one correction is a single pass over that cache, 20.7× cheaper than regenerating the chunk. On five real-robot tasks spanning precision insertion, fragile-object handling, object reorientation, and long-horizon manipulation, TacPAC leads every task and raises the average from 22% for its vision-only base model to 64%. Code is available at https://github.com/LogosRoboticsGroup/TacPAC.
Key facts. Cited by 2 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 44 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.
Builds on
44 of 48 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?17 Jun
- 2026TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation9 Jun
- 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation7 Jun
- 2026WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints1 Jun
- 2026VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs24 Mar
- 2026OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation19 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
Other references · 35
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,568
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
- 2020DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor with Application to In-Hand Manipulationcited by 167
- 2018Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Taskscited by 154
- 2025Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 108
- 2024Binding Touch to Everything: Learning Unified Multimodal Tactile Representationscited by 95
- 2025ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulationcited by 91
- 2026DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Controlcited by 76
23 more
- 20243D-ViTac: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Visuo-Tactile Sensingcited by 72
- 2022See, Hear, and Feel: Smart Sensory Fusion for Robotic Manipulationcited by 68
- 2024Sparsh: Self-supervised touch representations for vision-based tactile sensingcited by 64
- 2025VTLA: Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Preference Learning for Insertion Manipulationcited by 55
- 2023IndustReal: Transferring Contact-Rich Assembly Tasks from Simulation to Realitycited by 53
- 2018GelSlim: A High-Resolution, Compact, Robust, and Calibrated Tactile-sensing Fingercited by 52
- 2026Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Modelscited by 50
- 2024Transferable Tactile Transformers for Representation Learning Across Diverse Sensors and Taskscited by 45
- 2026Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodimentscited by 44
- 2025ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulationcited by 38
- 2024FoAR: Force-Aware Reactive Policy for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulationcited by 33
- 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectoriescited by 29
- 2026From Foundation to Application: Improving VLA Models in Practicecited by 26
- 2020Tactile Dexterity: Manipulation Primitives with Tactile Feedbackcited by 23
- 2026Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stackcited by 22
- 2023Efficient Sim-to-real Transfer of Contact-Rich Manipulation Skills with Online Admittance Residual Learningcited by 21
- 2025Tactile-VLA: Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Model's Physical Knowledge for Tactile Generalizationcited by 19
- 2025Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 18
- 2026FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 13
- 2026T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulationcited by 13
- 2026Wall-OSS-0.5 Technical Reportcited by 12
- 2020Pose-Based Tactile Servoing: Controlled Soft Touch using Deep Learningcited by 6
- 2026Learning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreamingcited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2026ForeTac: Predictive Contact Guidance for Generative Robot Policies
- 2026ReTouch: Empowering Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation with Online-Refined Tactile Prediction
- 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Training
- 2026TacForcing: Streaming Action Generation with Execution-Time Tactile Feedback