ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models bring the predictive capabilities of video models into robot action generation, providing a rich foundation for modeling future visual states. Tactile sensing complements this foundation with direct measurements of physical interaction. Some existing methods use tactile features as conditioning inputs without jointly predicting future tactile states, visual observations, and actions. Our key insight is that tactile signals, like video, provide observations of the evolving world state and should be modeled as future observations alongside video. We present ME-Dex-1.0 (MachEmbodied-Dex-1.0), a unified World Action Tactile Model for joint visual, tactile, and action learning. ME-Dex-1.0 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture comprising a Video Expert, a Tactile Expert, and an Action Expert, all trained with flow matching. We use shared attention connects the experts in intermediate layers, allowing action generation to draw on learned representations of visual and tactile dynamics during joint denoising. To support multi-source heterogeneous tactile inputs, a Canonical Hand Model and a Unified Tactile Autoencoder map tactile observations from different embodiments and sensing layouts into shared spatial and latent spaces. To address the limited availability of paired visual, tactile, and action data, we develop the Agentic Tactile Data Engine, an agent-based data production platform. It supplements RoboTwin and DexJoCo with tactile data recorded directly from force sensors during trajectory replay in simulation. Experiments on the RoboTwin, DexJoCo, and ManiFeel simulation platforms, together with real robot evaluations, demonstrate improved manipulation performance using both grippers and dexterous hands equipped with tactile sensing.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 20 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.
Builds on
20 of 49 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Motus2: A Self-Evolving General World Model for Dexterous Manipulation31 Aug
- 2026DECOWAM: Decoupled Whole-Body World-Action Model for Legged Mobile Manipulation20 Aug
- 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation24 Jul
- 2026VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation2 Jul
- 2026τ0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation31 May
- 2026Motubrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control30 Apr
- 2026OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation19 Mar
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Visuo-Tactile World Models5 Feb
- 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
Other references · 8
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
- 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 883
- 2025ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulationcited by 38
- 2025Tactile-VLA: Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Model's Physical Knowledge for Tactile Generalizationcited by 19
- 2025ManiFeel: Benchmarking and Understanding Visuotactile Manipulation Policy Learningcited by 13
- 2026T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulationcited by 13
- 2026TouchWorld: A Predictive and Reactive Tactile Foundation Model for Dexterous Manipulationcited by 9
- 2026DexJoCo: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Task-Oriented Dexterous Manipulation on MuJoCocited by 8
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Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model
- 2026VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs
- 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
- 2023Multi-Modal World Model for Physical Robot Interactions: Simultaneous Visual and Tactile Predictions for Enhanced Accuracy
- 2026DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation
- 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2026DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation
- 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control