Data-Free Continual Learning for World Action Model with Rectified Generative Replay
On the map: World models → Embodied and robot world models also fits: Latent dynamics models and model-based RL
Abstract (arXiv)
World action models (WAMs) built on pretrained video generation models adapt quickly to new robotic tasks, but they forget previously learned tasks under sequential fine-tuning. Experience replay (ER) mitigates such forgetting by rehearsing data of previous tasks, yet this data is often unavailable in robotics, where a policy is deployed as weights only and its training data is not shared along with it. In this work, we ask whether a WAM can achieve data-free continual learning by regenerating its own past. Our key observation is that a WAM can indeed autoregressively regenerate complete rollouts of previously learned tasks and replay them to mitigate forgetting. However, replaying such raw rollouts still lags far behind replaying real data, which we attribute to two issues. First, the WAM is unable to recognize task completion and keeps generating purposeless motion after the task is done. Second, under open-loop generation, the generated actions gradually drift away from the generated observations. To address both issues, we present rectified generative replay (R2-WAM), which truncates generated rollouts at task completion with an agentic evaluator and filters out rollouts whose actions are physically inconsistent with the observations. On the four LIBERO suites and five real-world tasks, R2-WAM reduces forgetting by over 90% relative to sequential fine-tuning and nearly matches ER without accessing any data from previous tasks. Our analysis further reveals that forgetting in WAMs concentrates in inverse dynamics modeling: a forgotten WAM still produces visually plausible observations of previous tasks while its generated actions fail. Project page: https://kaipengfang.github.io/r2-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 48 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.
Builds on
48 of 56 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2026World Action Models Enable Continual Imitation Learning with Recurrent Generative Replays25 Jun
- 2026Is the Future Compatible? Diagnosing Dynamic Consistency in World Action Models8 May
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Control29 Jan
- 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation11 Oct
- 2025DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models19 May
- 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets3 Apr
Other references · 41
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- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,581
- 2016Learning without Forgettingcited by 2,496
- 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
- 2016Progressive Neural Networkscited by 1,361
- 2020Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learningcited by 1,256
- 2017Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replaycited by 1,158
- 2018Experience Replay for Continual Learningcited by 1,095
- 2018Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEMcited by 1,058
- 2021Learning to Prompt for Continual Learningcited by 944
29 more
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- 2021CRIL: Continual Robot Imitation Learning via Generative and Prediction Modelcited by 24
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