Hydra: A Navigation World Action Model with Discrete Latent Planning and Continuous Flow-Matching Execution
TL;DR
Hydra, a discrete World Action Model that tackles this by establishing a unified latent manifold over visual states, physical poses, and control actions, outperforms state-of-the-art navigation world models in goal-directed planning, while matching or exceeding the closed-loop execution capabilities of leading reactive navigation policies.
Abstract
World models let robots imagine possible futures, but exploiting this capability for real-time planning is bottlenecked by a representation misalignment: generative models and planners operate on decoupled manifolds, requiring computationally expensive decoding of every candidate back to the high-dimensional observation space for evaluation. In this paper, we present Hydra, a discrete World Action Model that tackles this by establishing a unified latent manifold over visual states, physical poses, and control actions. By compressing this manifold through modality-specific Vector-Quantized bottlenecks, Hydra yields discrete vocabularies of kinodynamic intents and visual states. This enables Discrete Latent Planning (DLP), where candidates are sampled directly from the shared manifold and ranked by a Kinematic-Perceptual Cost within the discrete latent space. To bridge discrete planning with the continuous commands required for physical actuation, Hydra pairs DLP with conditional Flow Matching to map selected intents to smooth execution trajectories. Evaluated on two physical robotic platforms, Hydra outperforms state-of-the-art navigation world models in goal-directed planning, while matching or exceeding the closed-loop execution capabilities of leading reactive navigation policies.