WholeBodyWAM: Learning Whole-Body World Action Models with Scalable Motion Priors
On the map: World models → Humanoid and legged locomotion world models
Abstract (arXiv)
Humanoid whole-body manipulation requires coordinated whole-body dynamics, yet large-scale trajectories from a target robot are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, whole-body motion from human and humanoid sources is abundantly available, although such data cannot be directly used as embodiment-specific robot actions. This work asks whether these scalable motion resources can instead provide a transferable predictive prior for humanoid world-action modeling. We introduce WholeBodyWAM, a humanoid world-action model that learns whole-body dynamics from large-scale heterogeneous motion before target-robot training. We curate UniMotion-4K, a motion corpus spanning more than 4K hours from human videos, native 3D motion datasets, and heterogeneous humanoid platforms, and canonicalize these diverse sources into a unified motion space. A language-conditioned Motion Expert is then pretrained to predict future whole-body motion without target-robot action supervision. During robot post-training, the pretrained Motion Expert is integrated with Video and Action Experts through asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention, enabling predictive scene dynamics and whole-body motion to jointly inform embodiment-specific action generation. Experiments show that WholeBodyWAM consistently benefits from increased motion-pretraining scale, improves future-motion prediction and downstream task performance, and transfers effectively to real-world humanoid manipulation. Moreover, the pretrained motion prior substantially improves data efficiency under limited target-robot demonstrations.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Humanoid and legged locomotion world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.
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- 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 21
- 2026HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulationcited by 10
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- 2026WholeBodyWAM: Generalizing Pre-trained World-Action Priors to Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via WBC-Grounded Coordination
- 2026WB-WAM: Heterogeneous Body-Hand Pre-training for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation ↗
- 2026Towards a General Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Model via Egocentric Whole-Body Human Data Pretraining ↗
- 2026ZeroWBC: Learning Natural Whole-Body Humanoid Interaction from Human Egocentric Data
- 2026ω-0: A Latent Predictive World Action Model for Concurrent Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
- 2025TrajBooster: Boosting Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Trajectory-Centric Learning
- 2026Whole-Body UMI: Transferring UMI Manipulation Skills to Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Real-Time Motion Generation ↗
- 2026DECOWAM: Decoupled Whole-Body World-Action Model for Legged Mobile Manipulation