WAM-RL: World-Action Model Reinforcement Learning with Reconstruction Rewards and Online Video SFT

Recent World-Action (WA) models demonstrate strong generalization ability and data efficiency, but they typically rely on expert trajectories for training. This reliance limits their ability to acquire fine-grained manipulation skills beyond the demonstration distribution and prevents them from continuously improving through real-world interaction. To address these limitations, we propose WAM-RL, a reinforcement learning framework that enables joint optimization of the world model and the action model through online interaction with the environment. By allowing the two components to co-evolve, our approach enhances fine-grained control and adaptability. Specifically, a WA model consists of a world model and an actor. We design a tailored reinforcement learning method with hierarchical optimization to coordinate their improvement. On the methodological side, we systematically investigate the effects of applying reinforcement learning to the action model, as well as online training of the world model within an RL setting. Our experiments reveal a key insight: optimizing only the actor yields improvements on short-horizon tasks, but fails to provide significant gains on long-horizon tasks. In contrast, jointly optimizing both the world model and the actor is critical for achieving strong performance in long-horizon settings. Our work is the first to introduce reinforcement learning into the World-Action paradigm, and provides insights into how online optimization of both the action head and the world model impacts overall performance.

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination

World-Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control by coupling future visual prediction with action generation. However, most existing WAMs rely on photorealistic future prediction, which incurs high inference latency and makes real-time robot deployment difficult. This motivates a more efficient WAM design that preserves the control benefits of future visual prediction while reducing its inference cost. We introduce Efficient-WAM, a World-Action Model that reduces the cost of future imagination while preserving its control benefit. Efficient-WAM improves inference efficiency via a compact video expert transferred from WAN-2.2-5B, token-sparse video latents, and asymmetric video-action denoising that allocates fewer sampling steps to video than to actions. Instead of optimizing the future branch for visual fidelity, Efficient-WAM treats future video prediction as a compact guidance signal for action generation. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks show that Efficient-WAM maintains strong action performance despite visibly coarse future predictions. While maintaining competitive control capabilities, our 1B-parameter model can reduce per-chunk latency to around 100 ms during physical deployment, achieving a 30x speedup over existing WAMs.

Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation

World action models inherit the predictive capability of world models, enabling action generation to be guided by anticipated future observations. However, they rely primarily on vision and often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where critical cues arise from physical interaction. In this paper, we propose Dream-Tac, a unified Tactile-World Action Model that jointly models actions, future visual observations, and tactile dynamics. Specifically, Dream-Tac introduces (i) contact-gated visuotactile fusion to selectively integrate tactile signals and (ii) a contact-aware attention bias to better regulate cross-modal interactions during manipulation. To support real-time deployment, we further design a dual-level acceleration strategy, reformulating the contact-aware bias to preserve the fused attention path during training and introducing cache-based diffusion acceleration at inference, achieving up to 2.9$\times$ faster training and 1.8$\times$ faster inference. Across six contact-rich manipulation tasks, Dream-Tac improves action accuracy by 31.7\% on average, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified visuotactile world modeling.Code is available at https://github.com/LYFCLOUDFAN/Dream-Tac.

ProDrive: Proactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Ego-Environment Co-Evolution

End-to-end autonomous driving planners typically generate trajectories from current observations alone. However, real-world driving is highly dynamic, and such reactive planning cannot anticipate future scene evolution, often leading to myopic decisions and safety-critical failures. We propose ProDrive, a world-model-based proactive planning framework that enables ego-environment co-evolution for autonomous driving. ProDrive jointly trains a query-centric trajectory planner and a bird's-eye-view (BEV) world model end-to-end: the planner generates diverse candidate trajectories and planning-aware ego tokens, while the world model predicts future scene evolution conditioned on them. By injecting planner features into the world model and evaluating all candidates in parallel, ProDrive preserves end-to-end gradient flow and allows future outcome assessment to directly shape planning. This bidirectional coupling enables proactive planning beyond current-observation-driven decision-making. Experiments on NAVSIM v1 show that ProDrive outperforms strong baselines in both safety and planning efficiency, while ablations validate the effectiveness of the proposed ego-environment coupling design.

Mask World Model: Predicting What Matters for Robust Robot Policy Learning

World models derived from large-scale video generative pre-training have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robot policy learning. However, standard approaches often focus on high-fidelity RGB video prediction, this can result in overfitting to irrelevant factors, such as dynamic backgrounds and illumination changes. These distractions reduce the model's ability to generalize, ultimately leading to unreliable and fragile control policies. To address this, we introduce the Mask World Model (MWM), which leverages video diffusion architectures to predict the evolution of semantic masks instead of pixels. This shift imposes a geometric information bottleneck, forcing the model to capture essential physical dynamics and contact relations while filtering out visual noise. We seamlessly integrate this mask dynamics backbone with a diffusion-based policy head to enable robust end-to-end control. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MWM on the LIBERO and RLBench simulation benchmarks, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art RGB-based world models. Furthermore, real-world experiments and robustness evaluation (via random token pruning) reveal that MWM exhibits superior generalization capabilities and robust resilience to texture information loss.

Key-Embedded Privacy for Decentralized AI in Biomedical Omics

The rapid adoption of data-driven methods in biomedicine has intensified concerns over privacy, governance, and regulation, limiting raw data sharing and hindering the assembly of representative cohorts for clinically relevant AI. This landscape necessitates practical, efficient privacy solutions, as cryptographic defenses often impose heavy overhead and differential privacy can degrade performance, leading to sub-optimal outcomes in real-world settings. Here, we present a lightweight federated learning method, INFL, based on Implicit Neural Representations that addresses these challenges. Our approach integrates plug-and-play, coordinate-conditioned modules into client models, embeds a secret key directly into the architecture, and supports seamless aggregation across heterogeneous sites. Across diverse biomedical omics tasks, including cohort-scale classification in bulk proteomics, regression for perturbation prediction in single-cell transcriptomics, and clustering in spatial transcriptomics and multi-omics with both public and private data, we demonstrate that INFL achieves strong, controllable privacy while maintaining utility, preserving the performance necessary for downstream scientific and clinical applications.

LABSHIELD: A Multimodal Benchmark for Safety-Critical Reasoning and Planning in Scientific Laboratories

Artificial intelligence is increasingly catalyzing scientific automation, with multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents evolving from lab assistants into self-driving lab operators. This transition imposes stringent safety requirements on laboratory environments, where fragile glassware, hazardous substances, and high-precision laboratory equipment render planning errors or misinterpreted risks potentially irreversible. However, the safety awareness and decision-making reliability of embodied agents in such high-stakes settings remain insufficiently defined and evaluated. To bridge this gap, we introduce LABSHIELD, a realistic multi-view benchmark designed to assess MLLMs in hazard identification and safety-critical reasoning. Grounded in U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and the Globally Harmonized System (GHS), LABSHIELD establishes a rigorous safety taxonomy spanning 164 operational tasks with diverse manipulation complexities and risk profiles. We evaluate 20 proprietary models, 9 open-source models, and 3 embodied models under a dual-track evaluation framework. Our results reveal a systematic gap between general-domain MCQ accuracy and Semi-open QA safety performance, with models exhibiting an average drop of 32.0% in professional laboratory scenarios, particularly in hazard interpretation and safety-aware planning. These findings underscore the urgent necessity for safety-centric reasoning frameworks to ensure reliable autonomous scientific experimentation in embodied laboratory contexts. The full dataset will be released soon.

TC-IDM: Grounding Video Generation for Executable Zero-shot Robot Motion

The vision-language-action (VLA) paradigm has enabled powerful robotic control by leveraging vision-language models, but its reliance on large-scale, high-quality robot data limits its generalization. Generative world models offer a promising alternative for general-purpose embodied AI, yet a critical gap remains between their pixel-level plans and physically executable actions. To this end, we propose the Tool-Centric Inverse Dynamics Model (TC-IDM). By focusing on the tool's imagined trajectory as synthesized by the world model, TC-IDM establishes a robust intermediate representation that bridges the gap between visual planning and physical control. TC-IDM extracts the tool's point cloud trajectories via segmentation and 3D motion estimation from generated videos. Considering diverse tool attributes, our architecture employs decoupled action heads to project these planned trajectories into 6-DoF end-effector motions and corresponding control signals. This plan-and-translate paradigm not only supports a wide range of end-effectors but also significantly improves viewpoint invariance. Furthermore, it exhibits strong generalization capabilities across long-horizon and out-of-distribution tasks, including interacting with deformable objects. In real-world evaluations, the world model with TC-IDM achieves an average success rate of 61.11 percent, with 77.7 percent on simple tasks and 38.46 percent on zero-shot deformable object tasks. It substantially outperforms end-to-end VLA-style baselines and other inverse dynamics models.

PhysicsMind: Sim and Real Mechanics Benchmarking for Physical Reasoning and Prediction in Foundational VLMs and World Models

Modern foundational Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video world models have advanced significantly in mathematical, common-sense, and visual reasoning, but their grasp of the underlying physics remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks attempting to measure this matter rely on synthetic, Visual Question Answer templates or focus on perceptual video quality that is tangential to measuring how well the video abides by physical laws. To address this fragmentation, we introduce PhysicsMind, a unified benchmark with both real and simulation environments that evaluates law-consistent reasoning and generation over three canonical principles: Center of Mass, Lever Equilibrium, and Newton's First Law. PhysicsMind comprises two main tasks: i) VQA tasks, testing whether models can reason and determine physical quantities and values from images or short videos, and ii) Video Generation(VG) tasks, evaluating if predicted motion trajectories obey the same center-of-mass, torque, and inertial constraints as the ground truth. A broad range of recent models and video generation models is evaluated on PhysicsMind and found to rely on appearance heuristics while often violating basic mechanics. These gaps indicate that current scaling and training are still insufficient for robust physical understanding, underscoring PhysicsMind as a focused testbed for physics-aware multimodal models. Our data will be released upon acceptance.