# Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 61 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 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 61)

- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10274/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13030/) (2025)
- [Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02792/) (2025)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [Unified Video Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00200/) (2025)
- [Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02800/) (2026)
- [mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15692/) (2025)
- [GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17240/) (2026)
- [Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12276/) (2025)
- [VLA-JEPA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Model with Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10098/) (2026)
- [V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14482/) (2026)
- [FLARE: Robot Learning with Implicit World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15659/) (2025)
- [A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18692/) (2026)
- [Galaxea Open-World Dataset and G0 Dual-System VLA Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00576/) (2025)
- [DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10448/) (2026)
- [Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00078/) (2026)
- [Unified 4D World Action Modeling from Video Priors with Asynchronous Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26694/) (2026)
- [Back to the Features: DINO as a Foundation for Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19468/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [OpenWAM: An Open Framework for Composable World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07922/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

World-action models jointly learn robot policies and predict future observations, making the representation space an interface between control and prediction. We study the design of this space through controlled comparisons, finding that neither reconstruction fidelity nor pre-trained perceptual features alone ensure effective policy learning. These findings motivate ReWAM, a representation-centric world-action model built on pre-trained DINO features. Feature Calibration and a Temporal Representation Bottleneck organize these features into compact world states suited to dynamics modeling. Action-Grounded Representation Shaping routes only action-loss gradients to the bottleneck, thereby letting the policy shape what the representation encodes while the world model learns how it evolves. Without generative video pre-training, ReWAM achieves 93.6% success on RoboTwin 2.0. On RoboDojo, it achieves an average score of 12.29 and a success rate of 8.28% using approximately 600 hours of embodied pre-training data.