mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model

arXiv 2610.00638 ↗First posted 30 Sep 2026cs.ROcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

World action models improve robotic manipulation by conditioning actions on predicted futures, yet existing tactile variants largely inherit video-generation pipelines that reconstruct future tactile observations through iterative denoising. Such prediction can become unreliable under deployment drift: small changes in contact position or force may substantially alter tactile pixels even when the underlying contact evolution remains predictable. We introduce TacDyn-WAM, a heterogeneous visuo-tactile world action model that predicts implicit tactile dynamics rather than reconstructing future tactile observations. It learns TacRep, a dynamics-aware tactile target space trained through masked spatio-temporal prediction on tactile clips and regularized by relational structure distillation. A visual expert and an Implicit Tactile Dynamics Expert predict future visual and tactile representations in separate target spaces while interacting through joint attention; the tactile expert predicts future representations and their changes at multiple horizons in a single forward pass, and a read-only tactile memory supplies the current tactile state. On UniVTAC, TacDyn-WAM achieves an average success rate of 81.5% using only the provided demonstrations, reaching state-of-the-art-level performance and remaining competitive with models pretrained on large-scale visuo-tactile trajectories. Ablations confirm the benefits of both tactile pathways and TacRep over pixel-reconstruction and static alternatives. On five real-robot tasks, TacDyn-WAM reaches 71.0% average success, and modest-scale pretraining raises it to 85.0%, further validating our method.

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 43 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

Builds on

43 of 56 references.

Closest ancestors · 18

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ST-WAM: Semantic-Temporal World Action Model for Robust Manipulation under Visual Distribution Shifts31 Jul
  2. 2026TacWAM: Anchor-Guided World Action Model with Mechanics-Aware Tactile Prediction30 Jul
  3. 2026N0-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation26 Jul
  4. 2026ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation24 Jul
  5. 2026TACO: TActile World Model as a Self-COrrector for Scalable Robot Policy Post-Training3 Jul
  6. 2026VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation2 Jul
  7. 2026Tactile-WAM: Touch-Aware World Action Model with Tactile Asymmetric Attention25 Jun
  8. 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation11 Jun
  9. 2026TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation9 Jun
  10. 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation7 Jun
  11. 2026FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation7 Jun
  12. 2026VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs24 Mar
6 more
  1. 2026OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation19 Mar
  2. 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
  3. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
  4. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  5. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
  6. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning11 Jun

Other references · 25

  1. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,764
  2. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  4. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  5. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  6. 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 833
  7. 2024Sparsh: Self-supervised touch representations for vision-based tactile sensingcited by 61
  8. 2026InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulationcited by 48
  9. 2025TLA: Tactile-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 46
  10. 2026Xiaomi-Robotics-0: An Open-Sourced Vision-Language-Action Model with Real-Time Executioncited by 42
  11. 2025ViTacFormer: Learning Cross-Modal Representation for Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulationcited by 35
  12. 2026StarVLA-α: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systemscited by 27
13 more
  1. 2026TacVLA: Contact-Aware Tactile Fusion for Robust Vision-Language-Action Manipulationcited by 17
  2. 2025Tactile-VLA: Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Model's Physical Knowledge for Tactile Generalizationcited by 16
  3. 2026UniVTAC: A Unified Simulation Platform for Visuo-Tactile Manipulation Data Generation, Learning, and Benchmarkingcited by 15
  4. 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulationcited by 11
  5. 2026FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 11
  6. 2026TouchWorld: A Predictive and Reactive Tactile Foundation Model for Dexterous Manipulationcited by 9
  7. 2026N0-VTLA: Scaling Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Latent Tactile Tokenscited by 5
  8. 2026ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learningcited by 3
  9. 2026PhaForce: Phase-Scheduled Visual-Force Policy Learning with Slow Planning and Fast Correction for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 3
  10. 2026ADM-DP: Adaptive Dynamic Modality Diffusion Policy through Vision-Tactile-Graph Fusion for Multi-Agent Manipulationcited by 1
  11. 2026ReTac-ACT: A State-Gated Vision-Tactile Fusion Transformer for Precision Assemblycited by 1
  12. 2026Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learningcited by 1
  13. 2026TacForcing: Streaming Action Generation with Execution-Time Tactile Feedbackcited by 1

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  1. 2026HiTac-WAM: A Hierarchical Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
  2. 2026ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling
  3. 2026Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control
  4. 2026TacPAC: Tactile Prediction and Real-Time Action Correction in World-Action Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation
  5. 2026τ: Learning Touch-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models from Future Visual Supervision
  6. 2026Representation-Aligned Tactile Grounding for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation ↗
  7. 2026Disentangling Visuo-Tactile Foresight: Oracle-Guided Interface Discovery for World Action Models
  8. 2026UniTacVLA: Unified Tactile Understanding and Prediction in Vision Language Action Models