1Step-WAM: Your World Action Model but Faster using 1-Step Action Generation
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models also fits: Video-generation world models and simulators
Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models (WAMs) unify visual world modeling and action generation, yet their real-world deployment is heavily bottlenecked by iterative action denoising and the sequential execution of visual prefilling and action prediction. We demonstrate that the action-denoising trajectories in WAMs are approximately straight, rendering the first-step velocity a strong estimate of the final action direction. Building on this observation, we introduce 1Step-WAM, a framework that transforms multi-step action denoising into one single forward. Specifically, we employ a lightweight calibrator to directly correct the first step velocity, and use bandwidth-constrained action decoding to further reduce errors in the calibrated one-step actions. Compressing action generation into a single step enables it to execute in parallel with visual prefilling, completely breaking the sequential bottleneck of the traditional imagination-then-action paradigm. Evaluations on RoboTwin and LIBERO show that 1Step-WAM largely preserves multi-step task success with only about 13.4M trainable parameters, while achieving inference speedups of 7.44×, 5.98×, and 24.84× for FastWAM, ImageWAM and Kairos, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic deployments using the FastWAM backbone confirm a consistent 7.44× speedup while maintaining close success rate to the multi-step baseline. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/changdong1687/1Step-WAM.
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 27 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.
Builds on
27 of 32 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models3 Jun
- 2026GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model18 Mar
- 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?17 Mar
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
Other references · 23
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,822
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
- 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillationcited by 1,019
- 2022CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformerscited by 985
11 more
- 2024Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesiscited by 684
- 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
- 2025RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 518
- 2024One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Modelscited by 391
- 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 216
- 2025World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AIcited by 200
- 2024Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillationcited by 166
- 2024One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillationcited by 89
- 2026SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillationcited by 14
- 2026Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AIcited by 9
- 2026One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policiescited by 7
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- 2026Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination
- 2026ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?
- 2026C3ache: Accelerating World Action Models with Cross Inference Chunk Cache
- 2026MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models
- 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination
- 2026Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imagination
- 2026DualWAM: Dual-System World Action Models for Asynchronous Global Planning and Local Refinement
- 2026AnyStep-WAM: Budget-Aligned Distillation and Adaptive Inference for World Action Models