JOPAT jointly models pixels, point tracks, and actions in a diffusion transformer and reports gains over pixel-only baselines on long-horizon robot tasks with occlusion and off-screen motion.
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Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets
Canonical reference. 88% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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Background
88% of classified citations
abstract
Imitation learning has emerged as a promising approach towards building generalist robots. However, scaling imitation learning for large robot foundation models remains challenging due to its reliance on high-quality expert demonstrations. Meanwhile, large amounts of video data depicting a wide range of environments and diverse behaviors are readily available. This data provides a rich source of information about real-world dynamics and agent-environment interactions. Leveraging this data directly for imitation learning, however, has proven difficult due to the lack of action annotation. In this work, we present Unified World Models (UWM), a framework that allows for leveraging both video and action data for policy learning. Specifically, a UWM integrates an action diffusion process and a video diffusion process within a unified transformer architecture, where independent diffusion timesteps govern each modality. By controlling each diffusion timestep, UWM can flexibly represent a policy, a forward dynamics, an inverse dynamics, and a video generator. Through simulated and real-world experiments, we show that: (1) UWM enables effective pretraining on large-scale multitask robot datasets with both dynamics and action predictions, resulting in more generalizable and robust policies than imitation learning, (2) UWM naturally facilitates learning from action-free video data through independent control of modality-specific diffusion timesteps, further improving the performance of finetuned policies. Our results suggest that UWM offers a promising step toward harnessing large, heterogeneous datasets for scalable robot learning, and provides a simple unification between the often disparate paradigms of imitation learning and world modeling. Videos and code are available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/uwm/.
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representative citing papers
OA-WAM uses persistent address vectors and dynamic content vectors in object slots to enable addressable world-action prediction, improving robustness on manipulation benchmarks under scene changes.
EA-WM generates more accurate robot world rollouts by projecting actions as structured visual fields in camera space and using event-aware bidirectional fusion to better capture interaction dynamics.
Being-H0.7 adds future-aware latent reasoning to direct VLA policies via dual-branch alignment on latent queries, matching world-model benefits at VLA efficiency.
VistaBot integrates 4D geometry estimation and spatiotemporal view synthesis into action policies to improve cross-view generalization by 2.6-2.8x on a new VGS metric in simulation and real tasks.
An autoregressive diffusion model on sparse point trajectories predicts multi-modal future scene dynamics from single images with orders-of-magnitude faster sampling than dense video simulators while matching accuracy.
UniLACT improves VLA models by adding depth-aware unified latent action pretraining that outperforms RGB-only baselines on seen and unseen manipulation tasks.
Target-Bench shows the best off-the-shelf video world model scores only 0.341 on semantic target-approaching and directional consistency, with fine-tuning on a small robot dataset yielding measurable gains.
Multimodal Diffusion Forcing trains a diffusion model on partially masked multimodal robot trajectories to learn temporal and cross-modal dependencies for forceful manipulation.
DreamGen trains robot policies on synthetic trajectories from adapted video world models, enabling a humanoid robot to perform 22 new behaviors in seen and unseen environments from a single pick-and-place teleoperation dataset.
Ada-Diffuser is a causal diffusion model that jointly learns observed interaction structure and underlying latent dynamics from minimal observations for adaptive planning and policy learning.
A verifier called Future Forward Dynamics Causal Attention enables adaptive action execution in World Action Models, reducing model inferences by 69% and improving success rates in robotic tasks.
ConsisVLA-4D adds cross-view semantic alignment, cross-object geometric fusion, and cross-scene dynamic reasoning to VLA models, delivering 21.6% and 41.5% gains plus 2.3x and 2.4x speedups on LIBERO and real-world tasks.
MolmoAct2 is an open VLA model that outperforms baselines like Pi-05 on 7 benchmarks and whose backbone surpasses GPT-5 on 13 embodied-reasoning tasks through new datasets, specialized training, and architecture changes for lower latency.
X-WAM unifies robotic action execution and 4D world synthesis by adapting video diffusion priors with a lightweight depth branch and asynchronous noise sampling, achieving 79-91% success on robot benchmarks.
The paper introduces a unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all cognitive functions from Cognitive Architecture Theory, highlights under-researched areas in motivation and meta-cognition, and proposes Epistemic World Models as a new category for scientific discovery agents.
Sim-and-real co-training for robot policies is driven primarily by balanced cross-domain representation alignment and secondarily by domain-dependent action reweighting.
A vision-language-aligned world model turns visuomotor MPC into a language-following planner that reaches 87% success on 288 unseen semantic tasks where standard VLAs drop to 22%.
AIM predicts aligned spatial value maps inside a shared video-generation transformer to produce reliable robot actions, reaching 94% success on RoboTwin 2.0 with larger gains on long-horizon and contact-rich tasks.
CLWM with DINOv3 targets, O(1) TTT memory, SAI latency masking, and EmbodiChain training achieves SOTA dual-arm simulation performance and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer that beats real-data finetuned baselines.
MV-VDP jointly predicts multi-view RGB and heatmap videos via diffusion to achieve data-efficient, robust robotic manipulation policies.
Fast-WAM shows that explicit future imagination at test time is not required for strong WAM performance; video modeling during training provides the main benefit.
SimDist pretrains world models in simulation and adapts them to real-world robots by updating only the latent dynamics model, enabling rapid improvement on contact-rich tasks where prior methods fail.
DreamZero uses a 14B video diffusion model as a World Action Model to achieve over 2x better zero-shot generalization on real robots than state-of-the-art VLAs, real-time 7Hz closed-loop control, and cross-embodiment transfer with 10-30 minutes of data.
citing papers explorer
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Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning
Single-stage fine-tuning of a video model to generate actions as latent frames plus future states and values yields state-of-the-art robot policy performance on LIBERO, RoboCasa, and bimanual tasks.
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V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning
V-JEPA 2 pre-trained on massive unlabeled video achieves strong results on motion understanding and action anticipation, SOTA video QA at 8B scale, and enables zero-shot robotic planning on Franka arms using only 62 hours of unlabeled robot video.