Abstract:WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and instruction. Although convenient, this chunk-centric formulation creates a fundamental granularity mismatch. Language describes semantic goals and events, vision evolves through continuous scene dynamics, and actions operate at control-level timescales; forcing all three into the same fixed-length prediction window turns VLA training into short-horizon correlation fitting. WALL-WM addresses this mismatch by organizing both supervision and data around semantic events. Specifically, it pairs event-grounded VLA pretraining with a data ecosystem built from event-level captions and cluster-balanced sampling, enabling scalable learning over diverse behaviors, scenes, and task structures. From the same event-pretrained backbone, WALL-WM supports two complementary inference modes. The event mode consumes next-event descriptions and enables variable-length execution chunks, while the unified mode uses a VLM with Staircase Decoding to condition conventional fixed-length chunk inference while preserving a gradient-continuous VLA path. Together with Muon-optimizer-based large-scale pretraining infrastructure, WALL-WM provides a practical scale-up recipe for general-purpose WAMs. Experiments show that WALL-WM generalizes broadly across language, scenes, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in large-scale real-world generalization evaluation.
Abstract:Large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) pretraining is increasingly adopted as the foundation for robot policies, yet the evidence for pretrained VLAs is almost invariably reported after task-specific fine-tuning. This leaves a foundational question unanswered: does VLA pretraining itself yield executable robot behavior, or does it merely furnish a better initialization for downstream policy learning? We present Wall-OSS-0.5, an open-source 4B VLA built upon a 3B VLM backbone augmented with action-generation components, designed so that pretrained robotic capability is directly measurable on physical hardware. The model is pretrained across more than 20 embodiments, processing over one million robot trajectories per epoch alongside a grounded multimodal corpus. We adopt a gradient-bridged co-training recipe in which three objectives play distinct and complementary roles: discrete action prediction routes strong VLM-native gradients into the backbone, multimodal prediction preserves grounded vision-language understanding, and continuous flow matching serves as the deployment-time action interface. Before task-specific fine-tuning, the pretrained checkpoint achieves non-trivial zero-shot real-robot behavior, completing several tasks, including a held-out deformable manipulation task, at high task progress on a 17-task suite. After fine-tuning, the same checkpoint serves as a stronger adaptation prior, reaching 60.5% average task progress on 15 real-robot tasks and outperforming π_0.5 by 17.5%. Multimodal evaluations further confirm that action training does not erode grounded vision-language competence: the model preserves broad vision-language ability while strengthening embodied grounding. Together, these results reposition VLA pretraining from an initialization strategy to a directly testable, already useful source of robot capability.