Can World Models Benefit VLMs for World Dynamics?

Trained on internet-scale video data, generative world models are increasingly recognized as powerful world simulators that can generate consistent and plausible dynamics over structure, motion, and physics. This raises a natural question: with the advent of strong video foundational models, might they supplant conventional vision encoder paradigms for general-purpose multimodal understanding? While recent studies have begun to explore the potential of world models on common vision tasks, these explorations typically lack a systematic investigation of generic, multimodal tasks. In this work, we strive to investigate the capabilities when world model priors are transferred into Vision-Language Models: we re-purpose a video diffusion model as a generative encoder to perform a single denoising step and treat the resulting latents as a set of visual embedding. We empirically investigate this class of models, which we refer to as World-Language Models (WorldLMs), and we find that generative encoders can capture latents useful for downstream understanding that show distinctions from conventional encoders. Naming our best-performing variant Dynamic Vision Aligner (DyVA), we further discover that this method significantly enhances spatial reasoning abilities and enables single-image models to perform multi-frame reasoning. Through the curation of a suite of visual reasoning tasks, we find DyVA to surpass both open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable performance. We attribute these gains to WorldLM's inherited motion-consistency internalization from video pre-training. Finally, we systematically explore extensive model designs to highlight promising directions for future work. We hope our study can pave the way for a new family of VLMs that leverage priors from world models and are on a promising path towards generalist vision learners.

MathSticks: A Benchmark for Visual Symbolic Compositional Reasoning with Matchstick Puzzles

We introduce \textsc{MathSticks}, a benchmark for Visual Symbolic Compositional Reasoning (VSCR), which unifies visual perception, symbolic manipulation, and arithmetic consistency. Each task presents an incorrect matchstick equation that must be corrected by moving one or two sticks under strict conservation rules. The benchmark includes both text-guided and purely visual settings, systematically covering digit scale, move complexity, solution multiplicity, and operator variation, with 1.4M generated instances and a curated test set. Evaluations of 14 vision--language models reveal substantial limitations: closed-source models succeed only on simple cases, open-source models fail in the visual regime, while humans exceed 90\% accuracy. These findings establish \textsc{MathSticks} as a rigorous testbed for advancing compositional reasoning across vision and symbols. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Yuheng2000/MathSticks.

MLA: A Multisensory Language-Action Model for Multimodal Understanding and Forecasting in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/open-mla

WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction

Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.

BEVUDA++: Geometric-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Vision-centric Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception holds considerable promise for autonomous driving. Recent studies have prioritized efficiency or accuracy enhancements, yet the issue of domain shift has been overlooked, leading to substantial performance degradation upon transfer. We identify major domain gaps in real-world cross-domain scenarios and initiate the first effort to address the Domain Adaptation (DA) challenge in multi-view 3D object detection for BEV perception. Given the complexity of BEV perception approaches with their multiple components, domain shift accumulation across multi-geometric spaces (e.g., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) poses a significant challenge for BEV domain adaptation. In this paper, we introduce an innovative geometric-aware teacher-student framework, BEVUDA++, to diminish this issue, comprising a Reliable Depth Teacher (RDT) and a Geometric Consistent Student (GCS) model. Specifically, RDT effectively blends target LiDAR with dependable depth predictions to generate depth-aware information based on uncertainty estimation, enhancing the extraction of Voxel and BEV features that are essential for understanding the target domain. To collaboratively reduce the domain shift, GCS maps features from multiple spaces into a unified geometric embedding space, thereby narrowing the gap in data distribution between the two domains. Additionally, we introduce a novel Uncertainty-guided Exponential Moving Average (UEMA) to further reduce error accumulation due to domain shifts informed by previously obtained uncertainty guidance. To demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, we execute comprehensive experiments in four cross-domain scenarios, securing state-of-the-art performance in BEV 3D object detection tasks, e.g., 12.9\% NDS and 9.5\% mAP enhancement on Day-Night adaptation.

SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale human-operated robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks involving distribution shift. Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can dramatically enhance step-by-step reasoning capabilities, raising a natural question: Can RL similarly improve the long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. When applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves SoTA performance on LIBERO and even outperforms $\pi_0$ on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0 with the exploration-enhancing strategies we introduce. SimpleVLA-RL not only reduces dependence on large-scale data and enables robust generalization, but also remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon ``pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers previously unseen patterns beyond those seen in the previous training process. Github: https://github.com/PRIME-RL/SimpleVLA-RL

MMG-Vid: Maximizing Marginal Gains at Segment-level and Token-level for Efficient Video LLMs

Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) excel in video understanding, but their excessive visual tokens pose a significant computational challenge for real-world applications. Current methods aim to enhance inference efficiency by visual token pruning. However, they do not consider the dynamic characteristics and temporal dependencies of video frames, as they perceive video understanding as a multi-frame task. To address these challenges, we propose MMG-Vid, a novel training-free visual token pruning framework that removes redundancy by Maximizing Marginal Gains at both segment-level and token-level. Specifically, we first divide the video into segments based on frame similarity, and then dynamically allocate the token budget for each segment to maximize the marginal gain of each segment. Subsequently, we propose a temporal-guided DPC algorithm that jointly models inter-frame uniqueness and intra-frame diversity, thereby maximizing the marginal gain of each token. By combining both stages, MMG-Vid can maximize the utilization of the limited token budget, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining strong performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMG-Vid can maintain over 99.5% of the original performance, while effectively reducing 75% visual tokens and accelerating the prefilling stage by 3.9x on LLaVA-OneVision-7B. Code will be released soon.

4D Visual Pre-training for Robot Learning

General visual representations learned from web-scale datasets for robotics have achieved great success in recent years, enabling data-efficient robot learning on manipulation tasks; yet these pre-trained representations are mostly on 2D images, neglecting the inherent 3D nature of the world. However, due to the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, it is still hard to extract a universal 3D representation from web datasets. Instead, we are seeking a general visual pre-training framework that could improve all 3D representations as an alternative. Our framework, called FVP, is a novel 4D Visual Pre-training framework for real-world robot learning. FVP frames the visual pre-training objective as a next-point-cloud-prediction problem, models the prediction model as a diffusion model, and pre-trains the model on the larger public datasets directly. Across twelve real-world manipulation tasks, FVP boosts the average success rate of 3D Diffusion Policy (DP3) for these tasks by 28%. The FVP pre-trained DP3 achieves state-of-the-art performance across imitation learning methods. Moreover, the efficacy of FVP adapts across various point cloud encoders and datasets. Finally, we apply FVP to the RDT-1B, a larger Vision-Language-Action robotic model, enhancing its performance on various robot tasks. Our project page is available at: https://4d- visual-pretraining.github.io/.

HumanoidVerse: A Versatile Humanoid for Vision-Language Guided Multi-Object Rearrangement

We introduce HumanoidVerse, a novel framework for vision-language guided humanoid control that enables a single physically simulated robot to perform long-horizon, multi-object rearrangement tasks across diverse scenes. Unlike prior methods that operate in fixed settings with single-object interactions, our approach supports consecutive manipulation of multiple objects, guided only by natural language instructions and egocentric camera RGB observations. HumanoidVerse is trained via a multi-stage curriculum using a dual-teacher distillation pipeline, enabling fluid transitions between sub-tasks without requiring environment resets. To support this, we construct a large-scale dataset comprising 350 multi-object tasks spanning four room layouts. Extensive experiments in the Isaac Gym simulator demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art in both task success rate and spatial precision, and generalizes well to unseen environments and instructions. Our work represents a key step toward robust, general-purpose humanoid agents capable of executing complex, sequential tasks under real-world sensory constraints. The video visualization results can be found on the project page: https://haozhuo-zhang.github.io/HumanoidVerse-project-page/.

$NavA^3$: Understanding Any Instruction, Navigating Anywhere, Finding Anything

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose $NavA^3$, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $NavA^3$ achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete longhorizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available. Project website: https://NavigationA3.github.io/.