What Does World Modeling Actually Improve in Robot Action Learning?
Hanwen Cui, Yuanyuan Li, Qing Guo, Zhida Zhang, Chao Chen, Xi Chen, Jie Cao
World Action Models (WAMs) combine future-video prediction with robot action learning, yet improvements in task success alone do not reveal how predictive supervision manifests in execution behavior or whether its benefits persist under task and environmental shifts. We conduct controlled future-video prediction loss ablations within FastWAM and OpenWAM, keeping model architecture, initialization, robot training data, and training steps fixed within each model family. Under clean conditions on seen tasks, predictive supervision increases success rates by 24.38 and 72.91 percentage points, respectively. Trajectory clustering further reveals higher success rates within several coarse trajectory clusters, including cases where cluster frequencies change little, indicating that the gains are not solely reflected in changes in the prevalence of trajectory patterns. However, these benefits do not consistently persist under distribution shifts: improvements on unseen tasks vary across models and tasks, while both models exhibit low success rates under the evaluated environmental randomizations, without a consistent advantage from predictive supervision. We further introduce future-video prediction as an auxiliary training objective for $π_{0.5}$, where a lightweight Transformer predictor used only during training increases success from 82.94% to 89.19%. These findings support future-video prediction as effective auxiliary supervision for action learning, while distinguishing improved execution on familiar tasks from reliable transfer and showing that such gains need not rely on a large pretrained video diffusion transformer (DiT) in the evaluated setting.
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