Zhefan Rao, Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Jingfan Chen, Guohao Cai, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang 等 92 位作者
World Models (WMs) can support Multimodal Agents (MAs) through simulated experience, while Agent trajectories can inform World Model refinement. Evaluating this interaction requires separate evidence about action selection and state evolution. We introduce Dual Exam, which tests Agents under fixed environment response mechanisms and World Models under fixed action interventions across physical, digital, social, and scientific domains. The Agent track compares 10 configurations on 1,088 items in 15 reporting categories. The World Model track contains 400 cases across eight scenarios; 15 configurations have full coverage and one covers six scenarios. GPT 6 Astra leads the case-weighted Agent Index at 31.3, and GPT-Image-2 leads the full-coverage WM Overall at 21.7. These scores use different tasks and metrics and are not directly comparable. A 150-case pilot of one coupled pairing records zero task successes and motivates component-level diagnosis. Results reveal uneven task performance and failures to preserve task-relevant state. Their value for predicting coupled success or sustained reciprocal learning remains to be established.
Direct-policy World Action Models (WAM) have demonstrated the benefits of decoupling action generation from explicit future visual prediction for efficient inference in autonomous driving and embodied control. However, they still require tens of denoising steps to achieve competitive action quality, incurring substantial latency and hindering real-time deployment. Simply reducing the number of denoising steps will collapse the nonlinear multi-step denoising trajectory into coarse updates, substantially degrading action quality. To reduce the denoising steps while enabling real-time action generation, we present an effective world action model with one-step action generation, namely OSWAM, for autonomous driving and embodied control. We argue that it is the absence of structured action priors in random noise initialization that forces direct-policy WAMs to recover coherent action sequences through iterative denoising. Hence, we construct imagination tokens to initialize the diffusion process, providing physical priors and action-conditioned representations. We further introduce privileged information distillation with future conditioning to enhance future-aware action generation. As a result, OSWAM can efficiently and effectively generate high quality actions in just one diffusion step. Our experiments demonstrate that OSWAM achieves comparable or even better results in both autonomous driving and embodied control than direct-policy WAM and Joint-WAM that require tens of steps. It obtains approximately $3\times$ speedup over direct-policy WAM baselines and supports real-time compiled inference with latency as low as 40ms on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU. The project page is available at https://gwenzhang.github.io/OSWAM/