Results demonstrate that model-external structured state maintenance and closed-loop agentic decision making can effectively extend the local control capabilities of WAMs into embodied task execution that is plannable, verifiable, and recoverable.
Abstract
World Action Models (WAMs) jointly learn environmental dynamics and robot actions, introducing priors over physical evolution into embodied control. However, finite-horizon prediction and action generation are insufficient for complex embodied tasks that require global planning, cross-stage state maintenance, execution verification, and failure recovery. We refer to this mismatch as the prediction-deliberation gap of WAMs. To address this gap, we propose HarnessWAM, an agentic framework for WAMs. HarnessWAM employs a vision-language-model-based Task Manager to maintain an evidence-grounded scene belief and a structured task graph. A capability-conditioned executable-space projection further constrains open-ended semantic plans into sequences of atomic skills that satisfy task dependencies, embodiment-state constraints, and the capability boundary of the underlying WAM. During execution, HarnessWAM operates through an event-driven, dual-timescale feedback loop: a lightweight progress estimator continuously provides high-frequency execution evidence, while the Task Manager deliberates at salient milestones by jointly considering the current observation, task state, and interaction history to determine whether to advance the task, acquire additional observations, revise the plan, or initiate local recovery. This mechanism enables the robot to recover its state after a subtask failure and resume execution without discarding previously acquired scene knowledge. HarnessWAM achieves state-of-the-art full-task and subtask success rates of 59.6% and 69.9% on RoboMemArena, and an SR of 23.7% on RoboCerebra Ideal. These results demonstrate that model-external structured state maintenance and closed-loop agentic decision making can effectively extend the local control capabilities of WAMs into embodied task execution that is plannable, verifiable, and recoverable.
WorldScape Policy 2.0 is introduced, a controllable WAM with reasoning-augmented long short-term memory and fine-grained instruction following and in-context adaptation that demonstrates superior capabilities in long-horizon autonomous planning, fine-grained instruction following and in-context adaptation.
Haisheng Su, Zongdai Liu, Xin Jin et al.· 2 citations
LM-X is introduced, which organizes prediction across task, event, and motor scales without claiming anatomical correspondence and shows that explicit multi-timescale predictive state can strengthen control while exposing interpretable internal estimates.
Real-time deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies necessitates asynchronous execution, wherein subsequent action chunks are computed concurrently with the execution of the current chunk, leading to prediction-execution misalignment and manifesting as inter-chunk discontinuities. Existing methods either superficially smooth chunk boundaries, require costly policy optimization, or exclusively forward-predict proprioceptive states yet neglect critical visual observations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FutureRTC}, a plug-and-play adaptation framework that predicts execution-time observations and states for asynchronous VLA control without modifying the underlying policy. Specifically, FutureRTC features a state correction module to compensate for the discrepancy between rolled-forward and actual execution-time proprioceptive states and an observation prediction module that forecasts execution-time visual representations by leveraging robot motion as an explicit physical prior through motion-aware feature transport and reconstruction. Furthermore, we introduce a policy consistency loss to align the action chunks generated from predicted contexts with those produced under the expected execution-time inputs of the VLA policy. Extensive experiments across simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that FutureRTC achieves superior robustness to inference delays, resulting in smoother trajectories, faster execution, and consistently higher task success rates.
Hai Jiang, Yi Zou, Binbin Liang et al.· 0 citations
Cortex is introduced, a bidirectionally aligned embodied agent framework with a customized planning interface that conveys executable and tractable subtask plans from high-level VLM to low-level VLA and enables zero-shot completion of unseen real-world long-horizon tasks.
Jiaqi Peng, Xiqian Yu, Delin Feng et al.· 1 citation
Embodied Tree of Thoughts (EToT), a novel Real2Sim2Real planning framework that leverages a physics-based interactive digital twin as an embodied world model, is validated on a suite of short- and long-horizon manipulation tasks, where it consistently outperforms baselines by effectively predicting physical dynamics and adapting to potential failures.
Wenjiang Xu, Mingkan Zhang, Cindy Wang et al.· IEEE Robotics and Automation...· 2 citations
Artificial general intelligence ultimately requires agents that can reason and act in the physical world. Action models, vision-language-action policies, and world models have advanced this goal, while World Action Models (WAMs) are particularly promising because they connect candidate interventions with predicted consequences. However, progress remains fragmented: models use incompatible action spaces and prediction targets, datasets and tasks follow different conventions, and runtime systems expose limited interfaces for reuse and evaluation. We review the evolution toward WAMs and organize these limitations into three coupled gaps: model roles and representations, objectives and standardization, and system composition. Building on this analysis, we propose a co-evolution roadmap for physical intelligence centered on the \emph{embodied brain}, a long-term model target for integrating multimodal context, comparing candidate interventions, and issuing state-transition or capability requests rather than direct actuator commands. WAMs provide promising prototypes for its predictive functions, while a physical harness grounds model outputs through tools, controllers, verification, and trace logging. Shared contracts align heterogeneous models, data, tasks, and embodiments, and closed-loop post-training converts verified interaction into reusable experience. Together, these components define a modular physical-intelligence stack for adaptive and self-improving embodied agents.
Yuanzhi Liang, Xufeng Zhan, Haibin Huang et al.· 1 citation