MARS: Systematic Multi-Level Acceleration for World Action Models
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models
Abstract (arXiv)
World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising alternative for embodied intelligence by jointly predicting future world states and robot actions. However, their heavy visual encoding and iterative generative inference incur substantial latency, limiting their applicability to high-frequency closed-loop control. Existing training-free acceleration methods typically optimize a single stage, yielding limited speedups or degraded control under aggressive reuse. In this work, we systematically profile the inference overhead of WAMs and observe abundant redundancy across Transformer computation, diffusion denoising, and consecutive policy queries. However, the safe removal of such redundancy depends strongly on its impact on action prediction and control sensitivity. Based on these observations, we introduce MARS, a training-free and plug-and-play framework for multi-level WAM acceleration. MARS selectively removes low-impact attention computation, adaptively accelerates diffusion inference according to motion granularity, and speculatively reuses predicted future visual representations across consecutive queries with online verification. Together, these complementary mechanisms provide remarkable acceleration while limiting approximation error. Extensive experiments across LIBERO, LIBERO-PRO, and RoboCasa show that MARS achieves up to 4.00×, 3.94×, and 2.10× end-to-end speedups, respectively, while maintaining task success rate close to the original policy. Moreover, MARS generalizes across different model backbones and across simulation and real-robot experiments, substantially improving the efficiency--performance trade-off of WAM inference. Our code is available at https://github.com/PKU-VaLuE-Lab/MARS.
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 41 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.
Builds on
41 of 43 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination8 Jun
- 2026C3ache: Accelerating World Action Models with Cross Inference Chunk Cache8 Jun
- 2026Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation7 Jun
- 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
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model21 Nov
- 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
Other references · 31
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 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
- 2025Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AIcited by 864
- 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 522
- 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 451
- 2024RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robotscited by 407
- 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 364
- 2023DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Freecited by 359
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planningcited by 300
- 2024Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Modelcited by 269
19 more
- 2025LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorizationcited by 179
- 2024Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Token-wise Feature Cachingcited by 156
- 2024Real-Time Video Generation with Pyramid Attention Broadcastcited by 149
- 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
- 2024DiTFastAttn: Attention Compression for Diffusion Transformer Modelscited by 115
- 2025EfficientVLA: Training-Free Acceleration and Compression for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 93
- 2025VLA-Cache: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation via Adaptive Token Cachingcited by 86
- 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Processcited by 70
- 2025VideoVLA: Video Generators Can Be Generalizable Robot Manipulatorscited by 64
- 2025Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulationcited by 62
- 2025SP-VLA: A Joint Model Scheduling and Token Pruning Approach for VLA Model Accelerationcited by 58
- 2025SpecPrune-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Models via Action-Aware Self-Speculative Pruningcited by 43
- 2025DiCache: Let Diffusion Model Determine Its Own Cachecited by 42
- 2025Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulationcited by 34
- 2025Falcon: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Partial Denoisingcited by 15
- 2025Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policycited by 12
- 2026X-Cache: Cross-Chunk Block Caching for Few-Step Autoregressive World Models Inferencecited by 7
- 2026Characterizing Vision-Language-Action Models across XPUs: Constraints and Acceleration for On-Robot Deploymentcited by 7
- 2026WorldCache: Content-Aware Caching for Accelerated Video World Modelscited by 3
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- 2026Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination
- 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models
- 2026HarnessWAM: Bridging Prediction and Deliberation in World Action Models
- 2026AHA-WAM:Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Modeling with Observation-Guided Context Routing
- 2026WAM-Cache: Staleness-Bounded KV Reuse for Efficient World Action Models
- 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI