mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AnyStep-WAM: Budget-Aligned Distillation and Adaptive Inference for World Action Models

arXiv 2609.33748 ↗First posted 27 Sep 2026cs.ROcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World-action models (WAMs) couple predictive visual modeling with action generation, typically relying on iterative denoising with a fixed denoising steps. However, manipulation tasks contain actions chunks with varying sensitivity to generation errors: critical actions require precision, while less sensitive actions allow faster generation with fewer denoising steps. Here we introduce AnyStep World Action Model, a general framework for tunable-budget prediction and scene-dependent computation allocation. Our budget-aligned teacher-trajectory distillation trains interval-conditioned flow maps using explicit frozen-teacher transitions and shared low-rank adapters, supporting action generation from one-step prediction to multi-step refinement. Building on this capability, a lightweight risk-benefit scheduler predicts teacher-curvature-based difficulty and budget-specific student-teacher fidelity from a single one-step preview, selecting the smallest budget predicted to satisfy risk-adaptive fidelity requirements. We evaluate our framework on three widely used WAMs Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA using RoboTwin 2.0. Our method reduces average denoising steps by 60.2%, 49.8%, and 85.28%, respectively, while maintaining baseline task success rates. In particular, our AnyStep training substantially improves model performance under a one-step denoising budget, increasing task success rates by 7.07%, 12.08%, and 8.94% on Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA, respectively. Experiments on six real-world manipulation tasks further validate its effectiveness.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2026.

Builds on

19 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models3 Jun
  2. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  3. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan

Other references · 16

  1. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  2. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  3. 2023Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inferencecited by 826
  4. 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 477
  5. 2025Improved Mean Flows: On the Challenges of Fastforward Generative Modelscited by 102
  6. 2025ManiFlow: A General Robot Manipulation Policy via Consistency Flow Trainingcited by 43
  7. 2025D3P: Dynamic Denoising Diffusion Policy via Reinforcement Learningcited by 10
  8. 2026Stable Velocity: A Variance Perspective on Flow Matchingcited by 10
  9. 2026Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 3
  10. 2026ELASTIC: Efficiently Learning to Adaptively Scale Test-Time Compute for Generative Control Policiescited by 3
  11. 2026DSA: Dynamic Step Allocation for Fast Autoregressive Video Generationcited by 2
  12. 2026The Geometry of Flow-Matching Uncertainty: A Cost-free Uncertainty Proxy and Its Application in Flow-based VLA Failure Detectioncited by 2
4 more
  1. 2026DriftingVLA: Native One-Step Vision-Language-Action Generation via Per-Dimension Temporal Driftingcited by 2
  2. 2026Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Modelscited by 1
  3. 2026Adaptive-WAM: Quality-Guided Early-Exit Planning from Intermediate Video-Diffusion Featurescited by 1
  4. 2026AdaVLA: Adaptive Step Flow Matching for Training-free Acceleration of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026WAM-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for World Action Models
  2. 2026RealtimeWAM: One-Step Asynchronous World Action Models
  3. 2026InternW0-Δ: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
  4. 2026WAM-OPD: Sharpening World Action Models via On-Policy Distillation
  5. 2026Enhancing Policy Learning with World-Action Model
  6. 2026SANTS: A State-Adaptive Scheduler for World Action Models
  7. 2026GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
  8. 2026Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imagination