mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control

arXiv 2609.20761 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2026cs.RO cs.LGcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World Action Models (WAMs) advance beyond conventional visuomotor policies by jointly predicting future world states and robot actions, enabling the policy to learn phys- ical dynamics that support effective control. However, recent tactile WAMs often rely on large-scale pretrained generative backbones to capture contact-rich physical dynamics, which limit their inference efficiency and flexible deployment. In this paper, we present Agile-WAM, an agile tactile World Action Model for contact-rich robot control. Agile-WAM encodes visual and tactile observations into a shared latent that serves as the source of a direct vision-tactile-to-action flow-matching process, which can jointly generate latent representations of action chunks and future visual/tactile latents. A key observation is that vision and tactile signals evolve at inherently different timescales: adjacent visual frames are often highly similar, whereas tactile signals can change abruptly upon contact. We therefore introduce multi-horizon multimodal prediction in Agile-WAM, which provides supervision for visual latent at a larger temporal offset while predicting the tactile latent in the next frame to capture fine-grained contact dynamics. Across nine simulated and five real-world contact-rich ma- nipulation tasks, Agile-WAM demonstrates strong and robust performance, outperforming the strongest baseline in success rate while maintaining low inference latency. In particular, in five real-world experiments, Agile-WAM yields a relative gain of 29.4% in overall success rates while achieving inference latency of 11.9 ms. These results demonstrate that multimodal WAM can be achieved with an agile architecture suitable for precise and high-frequency robot control. More details are available on our project page.

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 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

Builds on

21 of 21 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026WorldAgen: Unified State-Action Prediction with Test-Time World Model Training8 Sep
  2. 2026Tactile-WAM: Touch-Aware World Action Model with Tactile Asymmetric Attention25 Jun
  3. 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation7 Jun
  4. 2026VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs24 Mar
  5. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb

Other references · 16

  1. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  2. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  3. 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 205
  4. 2025Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 108
  5. 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulationcited by 104
  6. 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Processcited by 70
  7. 2024Learning Robotic Manipulation Policies from Point Clouds with Conditional Flow Matchingcited by 65
  8. 2024Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matchingcited by 54
  9. 2024AdaFlow: Imitation Learning with Variance-Adaptive Flow-Based Policiescited by 50
  10. 2025AnyTouch: Learning Unified Static-Dynamic Representation across Multiple Visuo-tactile Sensorscited by 48
  11. 2025FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learningcited by 34
  12. 2025VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policycited by 25
4 more
  1. 2025ManiFeel: Benchmarking and Understanding Visuotactile Manipulation Policy Learningcited by 13
  2. 2026AnyTouch 2: General Optical Tactile Representation Learning For Dynamic Tactile Perceptioncited by 12
  3. 2025Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representationcited by 8
  4. 2025IN-RIL: Interleaved Reinforcement and Imitation Learning for Policy Fine-Tuningcited by 5

Built on by

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. 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
  2. 2026TacWAM: Anchor-Guided World Action Model with Mechanics-Aware Tactile Prediction
  3. 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model
  4. 2026VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
  5. 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
  6. 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
  7. 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation
  8. 2026ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling