# Dynamic Manipulation with World-Action Models via Counterfactual Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33172/

## 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 72 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18088/) (2025)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10329/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17596/) (2023)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06158/) (2024)
- [Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00696/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10639/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07157/) (2016)
- [Visual Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04742/) (2018)
- [Visual Foresight: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00568/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07339/) (2025)
- [RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12377/) (2024)
- [MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19236/) (2025)
- [DART: Noise Injection for Robust Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09327/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World-Action models (WAMs) trained on static demonstrations often fail to manipulate moving targets even when they possess the required manipulation skills. We attribute this failure to target-response collapse: as execution advances, the policy becomes increasingly biased toward the learned continuation of its ongoing behavior and less responsive to target relocation. To bridge the gap between what the model has learned and what it can generate from the current context, we formulate dynamic manipulation as counterfactual planning by decoupling the context used for plan generation from the physical state used for execution. Our framework, Dynamic Predictive Planning (DPP), first uses the WAM's predictive rollout to estimate when an interaction is expected to occur, and combines this timing estimate with observed target motion to predict the target's future interaction position. DPP then constructs a counterfactual observation that places this predicted target position in a familiar robot context, allowing the model to invoke an existing manipulation skill rather than generate a recovery behavior from an unfamiliar robot-target configuration. The resulting plan is connected to the robot's actual state during execution. DPP enables real-time dynamic manipulation on a single consumer GPU without additional training on dynamic data. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse target motions, with simulation performance surpassing all evaluated baselines, including methods additionally trained on dynamic data. Project page: https://methoder00.github.io/DPP/