Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study

Robot action planning in the real world is challenging as it requires not only understanding the current state of the environment but also predicting how it will evolve in response to actions. Vision-language-action (VLA), which repurpose large-scale vision-language models for robot action generation using action experts, have achieved notable success across a variety of robotic tasks. Nevertheless, their performance remains constrained by the scope of their training data, exhibiting limited generalization to unseen scenarios and vulnerability to diverse contextual perturbations. More recently, world models have been revisited as an alternative to VLAs. These models, referred to as world action models (WAMs), are built upon world models that are trained on large corpora of video data to predict future states. With minor adaptations, their latent representation can be decoded into robot actions. It has been suggested that their explicit dynamic prediction capacity, combined with spatiotemporal priors acquired from web-scale video pretraining, enables WAMs to generalize more effectively than VLAs. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of prominent state-of-the-art VLA policies and recently released WAMs. We evaluate their performance on the LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0-Plus benchmarks under various visual and language perturbations. Our results show that WAMs achieve strong robustness, with LingBot-VA reaching 74.2% success rate on RoboTwin 2.0-Plus and Cosmos-Policy achieving 82.2% on LIBERO-Plus. While VLAs such as $π_{0.5}$ can achieve comparable robustness on certain tasks, they typically require extensive training with diverse robotic datasets and varied learning objectives. Hybrid approaches that partially incorporate video-based dynamic learning exhibit intermediate robustness, highlighting the importance of how video priors are integrated.

Ground Plane Projection for Improved Traffic Analytics at Intersections

Accurate turning movement counts at intersections are important for signal control, traffic management and urban planning. Computer vision systems for automatic turning movement counts typically rely on visual analysis in the image plane of an infrastructure camera. Here we explore potential advantages of back-projecting vehicles detected in one or more infrastructure cameras to the ground plane for analysis in real-world 3D coordinates. For single-camera systems we find that back-projection yields more accurate trajectory classification and turning movement counts. We further show that even higher accuracy can be achieved through weak fusion of back-projected detections from multiple cameras. These results suggeest that traffic should be analyzed on the ground plane, not the image plane