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Overview

The push toward general-purpose robots has produced two converging families of foundation models:

• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit the language grounding and visual understanding of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and adapt them to emit actions — a scalable route to language-conditioned policies.
• World Action Models (WAM) start from a world model / video backbone that predicts how a scene evolves, and adapt that predictive prior to emit actions — trading the "language→motion" grounding gap for a "dynamics→action" one.

These two families overlap: a WAM built on a pretrained VLM is simultaneously a VLA and a WAM. This list maps that landscape with a taxonomy grounded in the recent survey literature (see Surveys), so each category has a clear, defensible scope rather than an ad-hoc label.

[!NOTE] Legend — 📄 arXiv · 🌐 project page · 💻 code · 📊 dataset/benchmark. Tables are sorted newest-first within each category. The 🆕 Latest Papers section is refreshed daily from arXiv by a GitHub Action; everything else is hand-curated.

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Taxonomy at a Glance

flowchart TD
    A[Robot Foundation Models] --> B[Vision-Language-Action<br/>VLA]
    A --> C[World &amp; World-Action Models<br/>WM / WAM]
    A --> R[Action Representations]
    A --> P[Foundational Policies]

    B --> B1[By Action Representation:<br/>Autoregressive · Diffusion · Flow-Matching]
    B --> B2[By Capability:<br/>Reasoning/Dual-System · 3D-4D · Efficient · RL Fine-Tuning]

    C --> C1[Foundation / General World Models]
    C --> C2[WAM from Video Generation]
    C --> C3[WAM from VLMs]
    C --> C4[WAM from Scratch · Latent / JEPA]
    C --> C5[Domain: Driving · Navigation]

    R --> R1[Discrete / Autoregressive Tokenizers]
    R --> R2[Diffusion &amp; Flow-Matching Policies]

Table of Contents

• 🔑 Key Definitions
• 🆕 Latest Papers (Auto-updated)
• 📚 Surveys
• 🤖 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models
  • By Action Representation
    • Autoregressive / Discrete-Token VLA
    • Diffusion-based VLA
    • Flow-Matching VLA
  • By Capability
    • Reasoning & Dual-System (Fast–Slow) VLA
    • 3D / 4D-Aware VLA
    • Efficient & Real-Time VLA
    • RL Fine-Tuning for VLA
• 🌎 World & World-Action Models
  • Foundation / General World Models
  • WAM from Video Generation
  • WAM from VLMs
  • Unified VLA–World Models
  • Latent & JEPA World Models
  • Domain World Models (Driving & Navigation)
• 🧩 Action Representations & Tokenization
• 🦾 Foundational Robot Policies
• 📦 Resources
  • Datasets
  • Benchmarks
  • Simulation Platforms
  • Tools & Frameworks
• 🗂️ Extended Paper Index (Auto-Curated)
• 📋 Full Paper Index & Baselines
• 🤝 Contributing

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🔑 Key Definitions

[!IMPORTANT] VLA ∩ WAM. The families intersect: a WAM built on a pretrained VLM is both. The split in this list is by what prior the model starts from — VLM-style vision-language priors (VLA) vs. video/dynamics priors (WAM) — and, within VLA, by how actions are represented, the axis most surveys agree is the field's clearest discriminator.

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🆕 Latest Papers (Auto-updated)

Papers are automatically fetched daily from arXiv. Last updated: 2026-09-30

VLA

World Model

Policy

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📚 Surveys

Recent surveys that define the field and motivate the taxonomy used here.

World & Embodied World Models

Vision-Language-Action

Foundation Models & Embodied AI

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🤖 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models

Following the action-tokenization view (Zhong et al., 2025), the primary split is by how actions are represented; capability-oriented subsections (reasoning, 3D/4D, efficiency, RL) cut across it. A few pre-/non-VLM generalist policies (e.g., RT-1, Octo) are listed alongside their successors to show lineage — see Foundational Robot Policies for the strictly non-VLA baselines.

By Action Representation

Autoregressive / Discrete-Token VLA

Actions are binned into discrete tokens and decoded like text. Simple and VLM-native; high-frequency dexterity needs better tokenizers (see FAST).

Diffusion-based VLA

A diffusion action head denoises continuous action chunks conditioned on vision-language features.

Flow-Matching VLA

A conditional flow/vector field transports noise to action chunks — the dominant head for current SOTA generalist VLAs.

By Capability

Reasoning & Dual-System (Fast–Slow) VLA

Explicit chain-of-thought / embodied reasoning, or a slow System-2 planner paired with a fast System-1 controller.

3D / 4D-Aware VLA

Policies that reason over explicit 3D/4D structure (point clouds, occupancy, predicted future frames) rather than 2D images alone. (VoxPoser, a zero-shot 3D value-map planner, lives under Foundational Robot Policies.)

Efficient & Real-Time VLA

Compression, caching, parallel decoding, and distillation to make VLAs small and fast enough for real-time / edge control (Guan et al., 2025).

RL Fine-Tuning for VLA

Reinforcement learning (often on top of flow-/diffusion-based VLAs) to improve over imitation-only training.

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🌎 World & World-Action Models

Organized by what the model predicts and how it is built, following the embodied-world-model taxonomy of Li et al., 2025 and the WAM split popularized by awesome-vla-wam.

General World Models

General-purpose models of environment dynamics — spanning classical latent world models for model-based RL (World Models, DreamerV3) and modern large-scale video / foundation world models — used for planning, neural simulation, or as backbones for WAMs.

WAM from Video Generation

A (text-/image-conditioned) video generator imagines future frames; actions are recovered via an inverse-dynamics / action head.

WAM from VLMs

A pretrained VLM is turned into a world model (e.g., predicting goal images / object-centric futures) that then drives action.

Unified VLA–World Models

Single architectures that jointly learn to act and to predict world dynamics, blurring the VLA/WAM boundary.

Latent & JEPA World Models

Self-supervised latent predictive models (non-reconstructive joint-embedding / JEPA). The JEPA foundations (I-JEPA) learn to predict in representation space; the action-conditioned variant (V-JEPA 2-AC) turns that prior into a world model for planning.

Domain World Models (Driving & Navigation)

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🧩 Action Representations & Tokenization

Building blocks shared across VLA and WAM policies — how continuous actions become learnable targets.

Discrete / Autoregressive Tokenizers

Continuous & Chunked Action Policies

Heads that emit continuous action chunks — by denoising diffusion (Diffusion Policy) or by chunked sequence prediction with a CVAE (ACT). Flow-matching heads (π0, SmolVLA, …) are listed with their models under Flow-Matching VLA.

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🦾 Foundational Robot Policies

Non-VLA policies and planners that remain standard baselines in the experimental tables of the papers above. (Diffusion Policy, ACT, and BeT are described under Action Representations.)

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📦 Resources

Datasets

Benchmarks

Simulation Platforms

Tools & Frameworks

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🗂️ Extended Paper Index (Auto-Curated, Newest First)

A broader, continuously-mined index of recent arXiv work that complements the curated highlights above — 182 additional papers, newest first. Last updated: 2026-09-30. Auto-generated from data/*.json by scripts/expand_papers.py; papers already highlighted above are omitted here to avoid duplication.

VLA — General & Manipulation · 45 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Online Evolution Strategy for Flow-Matching VLA Policies via Self-Supervised Trajectory Distribution Optimization	Gongxin Yao, Yongsheng Zhao et al.	2026-09-30
Correcting WHERE, Preserving HOW: Compositional Generalization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Referential Guidance	Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu et al.	2026-09-29
Taming VLAs under Robot Execution Errors: Self-Compensation and Stress Testing	Sohyun Lee, Yoonjae Baek et al.	2026-09-29
Disentangling Spurious Correlations in Vision-Language-Action Models via Predicting Domain-Invariant Latent Lookahead	Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim et al.	2026-09-29
CoRe-VLA: Preserving Cross-View Coordination in VLAs under Camera Shifts	Tianhang Pan, Xuanhao Wang et al.	2026-09-29
VLALight: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Traffic Signal Control	Pan Zhang, Siqi Lai et al.	2026-09-29
Where Predictive Supervision Goes Shapes What VLA Policies Learn	Hanseul Kim, Jewon Yeom et al.	2026-09-29
The Layer Mystery of VLA: An Information-Theoretical Analysis of VLA Latent Interface	Yuxiang Liu, Lizhi Yang et al.	2026-09-28
FocusVLA: Focused Visual Utilization for Vision-Language-Action Models	Yichi Zhang, Weihao Yuan et al.	2026-03-30
ProgressVLA: Progress-Guided Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation	Hongyu Yan, Qiwei Li et al.	2026-03-29
MMaDA-VLA: Large Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model with Unified Multi-Modal Instruction and Generation	Yang Liu, Pengxiang Ding et al.	2026-03-26
ThermoAct:Thermal-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Perception and Decision-Making	Young-Chae Son, Dae-Kwan Ko et al.	2026-03-26
$π$, But Make It Fly: Physics-Guided Transfer of VLA Models to Aerial Manipulation	Johnathan Tucker, Denis Liu et al.	2026-03-26
TAG: Target-Agnostic Guidance for Stable Object-Centric Inference in Vision-Language-Action Models	Jiaying Zhou, Zhihao Zhan et al.	2026-03-25
VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs	Haoran Yuan, Weigang Yi et al.	2026-03-24
Gaze-Regularized Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation	Anupam Pani, Yanchao Yang	2026-03-24
CoMaTrack: Competitive Multi-Agent Game-Theoretic Tracking with Vision-Language-Action Models	Youzhi Liu, Li Gao et al.	2026-03-24
ProbeFlow: Training-Free Adaptive Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Models	Zhou Fang, Jiaqi Wang et al.	2026-03-18
The Steep-spectrum Radio-loud AGN Luminosity Function and Its Implications for Black Hole Growth and Star Formation	Wenjie Wang, Zunli Yuan et al.	2026-03-16
Building Explicit World Model for Zero-Shot Open-World Object Manipulation	Xiaotong Li, Gang Chen et al.	2026-03-14
Beyond Dense Futures: World Models as Structured Planners for Robotic Manipulation	Minghao Jin, Mozheng Liao et al.	2026-03-13
Adaptive Capacity Allocation for Vision Language Action Fine-tuning	Donghoon Kim, Minji Bae et al.	2026-03-08
HarvestFlex: Strawberry Harvesting via Vision-Language-Action Policy Adaptation in the Wild	Ziyang Zhao, Shuheng Wang et al.	2026-03-06
CRAFT: Adapting VLA Models to Contact-rich Manipulation via Force-aware Curriculum Fine-tuning	Yike Zhang, Yaonan Wang et al.	2026-02-13
HoloBrain-0 Technical Report	Horizon Robotics	2026-02-07	🌐
CLARE: Continual Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models via Autonomous Adapter Routing and Expansion	Ralf Römer, Yi Zhang et al.	2026-01-14
Diverse stages of star formation in the IRAS 18162-2048 region. Emergence of UV Feedback	R. Fedriani, G. Anglada et al.	2025-12-08
Mixture of Horizons in Action Chunking	Dong Jing, Gang Wang et al.	2025-11-24
A scaling relationship for non-thermal radio emission from ordered magnetospheres - II. Investigating the efficiency of relativistic electron production in magnetospheres of BA-type stars	P. Leto, S. Owocki et al.	2025-11-07
First X-ray and radio polarimetry of the neutron star low-mass X-ray binary GX 17+2	Unnati Kashyap, Thomas J. Maccarone et al.	2025-10-06
Deciphering the radio-star formation correlation on kpc scales. IV. Radio halos of highly-inclined Virgo cluster spiral galaxies	B. Vollmer, M. Soida et al.	2025-10-03
Masses, Star-Formation Efficiencies, and Dynamical Evolution of 18,000 HII Regions	Debosmita Pathak, Adam K. Leroy et al.	2025-09-26
X-ray and radio polarimetry of the neutron star low mass X-ray binary GX 13+1	Unnati Kashyap, Thomas J. Maccarone et al.	2025-08-07
Protostellar Outflows at the EarliesT Stages (POETS). VIII. The jets in the intermediate-mass star-forming region G105.42+9.88 (alias LkHα 234)	Luca Moscadelli, Fabrizio Massi et al.	2025-08-05
Star formation histories and gas content limits of three ultra-faint dwarfs on the periphery of M31	Michael G. Jones, David J. Sand et al.	2025-08-01
Quenching Through Tidal Gas Removal: Molecular Gas and Star Formation in Tidal Tails of z ~ 0.7 Post-Starburst Galaxies	Vincenzo R. D'Onofrio, Justin S. Spilker et al.	2025-07-28
AC-DiT: Adaptive Coordination Diffusion Transformer for Mobile Manipulation	Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu et al.	2025-07-02
The Radio Spectral Energy Distribution and Star Formation Calibration in MIGHTEE-COSMOS Highly Star-Forming Galaxies at 1.5 < z < 3.5	Fatemeh Tabatabaei, Maryam Khademi et al.	2025-06-19
Semi-empirical constraints on the HI mass function of star-forming galaxies and $Ω_{\rm HI}$ at $z\sim 0.37$ from interferometric surveys	Francesco Sinigaglia, Alessandro Bianchetti et al.	2025-06-12
A persistent disk wind and variable jet outflow in the neutron-star low-mass X-ray binary GX 13+1	Daniele Rogantini, Jeroen Homan et al.	2025-04-07
X-ray and radio data obtained by XMM-Newton and VLA constrain the stellar wind of the magnetic quasi-Wolf-Rayet star in HD45166	P. Leto, L. M. Oskinova et al.	2025-03-10
The Arp 240 Galaxy Merger: A Detailed Look at the Molecular Kennicutt-Schmidt Star Formation Law on Sub-kpc Scales	Alejandro Saravia, Eduardo Rodas-Quito et al.	2024-12-10
Runaway O and Be stars found using Gaia DR3, new stellar bow shocks and search for binaries	M. Carretero-Castrillo, M. Ribó et al.	2024-12-10
A-VL: Adaptive Attention for Large Vision-Language Models	Junyang Zhang, Mu Yuan et al.	2024-09-23
HiRT: Enhancing Robotic Control with Hierarchical Robot Transformers	Jianke Zhang, Yanjiang Guo et al.	2024-09-12

VLA — Reasoning, Planning & Dual-System · 5 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Do World Action Models Generalize Better than VLAs? A Robustness Study	Zhanguang Zhang, Zhiyuan Li et al.	2026-03-23
Act, Think or Abstain: Complexity-Aware Adaptive Inference for Vision-Language-Action Models	Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Gianluca Bardaro et al.	2026-03-05
Chain of World: World Model Thinking in Latent Motion	Fuxiang Yang, Donglin Di et al.	2026-03-03
FRAPPE: Infusing World Modeling into Generalist Policies via Multiple Future Representation Alignment	Han Zhao, Jingbo Wang et al.	2026-02-19
VGAS: Value-Guided Action-Chunk Selection for Few-Shot Vision-Language-Action Adaptation	Changhua Xu, Jie Lu et al.	2026-02-07

VLA — Autonomous Driving · 13 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory	Kai Yan, Xiangyu Chen et al.	2026-09-29
Data-Efficient Adaptation of a Driving VLA to Class 8 Trucks	Satyajeet Das, Aaron Buxbaum et al.	2026-09-29
Remember What You Did: Action-History Memory with Dual-Expert Denoising for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies	Yaxin Zhao, Dianye Huang et al.	2026-09-29
StreamingVLA: Streaming Vision-Language-Action Model with Action Flow Matching and Adaptive Early Observation	Yiran Shi, Dongqi Guo et al.	2026-03-30
Uni-World VLA: Interleaved World Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving	Qiqi Liu, Huan Xu et al.	2026-03-28
Vega: Learning to Drive with Natural Language Instructions	Sicheng Zuo, Yuxuan Li et al.	2026-03-26
Drive My Way: Preference Alignment of Vision-Language-Action Model for Personalized Driving	Zehao Wang, Huaide Jiang et al.	2026-03-26
ETA-VLA: Efficient Token Adaptation via Temporal Fusion and Intra-LLM Sparsification for Vision-Language-Action Models	Yiru Wang, Anqing Jiang et al.	2026-03-26
VLA-IAP: Training-Free Visual Token Pruning via Interaction Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models	Jintao Cheng, Haozhe Wang et al.	2026-03-24
SAMoE-VLA: A Scene Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language-Action Model for Autonomous Driving	Zihan You, Hongwei Liu et al.	2026-03-09
VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models	Liu, Xiangyu et al.	2026-02-18	🌐
A global view on star formation: The GLOSTAR Galactic plane survey XII. Effelsberg's continuum view and data release	Y. Gong, W. Reich et al.	2025-12-17
Low-frequency spectra of neutron star + OB supergiant binaries: Does wind density drive persistent and flaring modes of accretion?	J. van den Eijnden, L. Sidoli et al.	2025-08-06

VLA — Dexterous & Humanoid · 2 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
FineART: Fine-grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation	Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans et al.	2026-09-29
Grounding Sim-to-Real Generalization in Dexterous Manipulation: An Empirical Study with Vision-Language-Action Models	Ruixing Jin, Zicheng Zhu et al.	2026-03-24

VLA — 3D / 4D & Spatial · 4 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Beyond Token Importance: Preserving Spatial Scaffolds for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference	Jiayu Chen, Shuyong Gao et al.	2026-09-29
AeroManip-VLA: Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning for Aerial Manipulation with RL-Generated Demonstrations	Rui Huang, Yanlin Mu et al.	2026-09-29
LaMP: Learning Vision-Language-Action Policies with 3D Scene Flow as Latent Motion Prior	Xinkai Wang, Chenyi Wang et al.	2026-03-26
3D-Mix for VLA: A Plug-and-Play Module for Integrating VGGT-based 3D Information into Vision-Language-Action Models	Bin Yu, Shijie Lian et al.	2026-03-25

VLA — RL & Post-Training · 7 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Cooperative Multi-Agent Vision-Language-Action Models via Reinforced Fine Tuning	Ruixiao Xu, Wong Lik Hang Kenny et al.	2026-09-29
StructRL: Online Structured Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Tasks	Ziyi Yin, Sangmin Woo et al.	2026-09-28
VLA-OPD: Bridging Offline SFT and Online RL for Vision-Language-Action Models via On-Policy Distillation	Zhide Zhong, Haodong Yan et al.	2026-03-27
On-the-Fly VLA Adaptation via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning	Changyu Liu, Yiyang Liu et al.	2026-01-11
VLA Model Post-Training via Action-Chunked PPO and Self Behavior Cloning	Si-Cheng Wang, Tian-Yu Xiang et al.	2025-09-30
The arc-shaped radio source at the center of NGC 6334A: Is it a colliding wind region of two young massive stars or the bow shock of a runaway star?	Vanessa Yanza, Sergio A. Dzib et al.	2025-02-24
VLA 22 GHz Imaging of Massive Star Formation in Local Wolf-Rayet Galaxies	Nicholas G. Ferraro, Jean L. Turner et al.	2024-11-09

VLA — Efficient & Real-Time · 19 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Models	Rho Team, Simran Bagaria et al.	2026-09-29
Urgent Actions Go First: Urgency-Aware Denoising for Real-Time VLA Control	Zibo Wang, Haochen Han et al.	2026-09-29
DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA	Yi Chen, Yuying Ge et al.	2026-03-31
Realtime-VLA V2: Learning to Run VLAs Fast, Smooth, and Accurate	Chen Yang, Yucheng Hu et al.	2026-03-27
DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching	Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song et al.	2026-03-27
Fast-dVLA: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion VLA to Real-Time Performance	Wenxuan Song, Jiayi Chen et al.	2026-03-26
Beyond Attention Magnitude: Leveraging Inter-layer Rank Consistency for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models	Peiju Liu, Jinming Liu et al.	2026-03-26
Agile-VLA: Few-Shot Industrial Pose Rectification via Implicit Affordance Anchoring	Teng Yan, Zhengyang Pei et al.	2026-03-24
Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?	Tianyuan Yuan, Zibin Dong et al.	2026-03-17
FAVLA: A Force-Adaptive Fast-Slow VLA model for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation	Yao Li, Peiyuan Tang et al.	2026-02-27
Learning Native Continuation for Action Chunking Flow Policies	Yufeng Liu, Hang Yu et al.	2026-02-13
Environment-Aware Adaptive Pruning with Interleaved Inference Orchestration for Vision-Language-Action Models	Yuting Huang, Leilei Ding et al.	2026-01-31
Learning to Accelerate Vision-Language-Action Models through Adaptive Visual Token Caching	Yujie Wei, Jiahan Fan et al.	2026-01-31
AC^2-VLA: Action-Context-Aware Adaptive Computation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Efficient Robotic Manipulation	Wenda Yu, Tianshi Wang et al.	2026-01-27
U-DiT Policy: U-shaped Diffusion Transformers for Robotic Manipulation	Linzhi Wu, Aoran Mei et al.	2025-09-29
Leave No Observation Behind: Real-time Correction for VLA Action Chunks	Kohei Sendai, Maxime Alvarez et al.	2025-09-27
PD-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Model Integrated with Action Chunking via Parallel Decoding	Wenxuan Song, Jiayi Chen et al.	2025-03-04
ADEM-VL: Adaptive and Embedded Fusion for Efficient Vision-Language Tuning	Zhiwei Hao, Jianyuan Guo et al.	2024-10-23
VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks	Yi-Lin Sung, Jaemin Cho et al.	2021-12-13

VLA — Safety, Robustness & Evaluation · 12 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Faster and Better? Benchmark Bugs and Design Limitations Distort the Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Acceleration	Qiwei Chen, Kaijun Zhou et al.	2026-09-29
SABER: A Stealthy Agentic Black-Box Attack Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models	Xiyang Wu, Guangyao Shi et al.	2026-03-26
SOMA: Strategic Orchestration and Memory-Augmented System for Vision-Language-Action Model Robustness via In-Context Adaptation	Zhuoran Li, Zhiyang Li et al.	2026-03-25
ROBOGATE: Adaptive Failure Discovery for Safe Robot Policy Deployment via Two-Stage Boundary-Focused Sampling	Azuki Kim	2026-03-23
Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models	Zhilong Zhang, Haoxiang Ren et al.	2026-03-21
Generative Control as Optimization: Time Unconditional Flow Matching for Adaptive and Robust Robotic Control	Zunzhe Zhang, Runhan Huang et al.	2026-03-18
World2Act: Latent Action Post-Training via Skill-Compositional World Models	An Dinh Vuong, Tuan Van Vo et al.	2026-03-11
APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model	Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang et al.	2026-03-09
AtomVLA: Scalable Post-Training for Robotic Manipulation via Predictive Latent World Models	Xiaoquan Sun, Zetian Xu et al.	2026-03-09
AnyCamVLA: Zero-Shot Camera Adaptation for Viewpoint Robust Vision-Language-Action Models	Hyeongjun Heo, Seungyeon Woo et al.	2026-03-06
SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models	Hyeonbeom Choi, Daechul Ahn et al.	2026-02-04
SilentDrift: Exploiting Action Chunking for Stealthy Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models	Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang et al.	2026-01-20

World Models — General & Foundation · 10 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
NeuronDiscover: Agent-in-Twin for Mechanistic Discovery in Neuronal Microenvironments with World Action Models	Haowei Xu, Wanyi Fu et al.	2026-09-28
LOME: Learning Human-Object Manipulation with Action-Conditioned Egocentric World Model	Quankai Gao, Jiawei Yang et al.	2026-03-28
OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation	Yuhang Zheng, Songen Gu et al.	2026-03-19
Simulation Distillation: Pretraining World Models in Simulation for Rapid Real-World Adaptation	Jacob Levy, Tyler Westenbroek et al.	2026-03-16
WestWorld: A Knowledge-Encoded Scalable Trajectory World Model for Diverse Robotic Systems	Yuchen Wang, Jiangtao Kong et al.	2026-03-15
ResWM: Residual-Action World Model for Visual RL	Jseen Zhang, Gabriel Adineera et al.	2026-03-11
MetaWorld-X: Hierarchical World Modeling via VLM-Orchestrated Experts for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation	Yutong Shen, Hangxu Liu et al.	2026-03-09
Foundational World Models Accurately Detect Bimanual Manipulator Failures	Isaac R. Ward, Michelle Ho et al.	2026-03-07
What if? Emulative Simulation with World Models for Situated Reasoning	Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen et al.	2026-03-06
Self-adapting Robotic Agents through Online Continual Reinforcement Learning with World Model Feedback	Fabian Domberg, Georg Schildbach	2026-03-04

World Models — Video Generation & WAM · 8 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
One from Infinity: Actualizing Futures from Pretrained World Models into Robot Actions	Bang Du, Yichen Xie et al.	2026-09-29
What Makes World Action Models Generalize? An Empirical Study of Test-Time Future Modeling	Renping Zhou, Zanlin Ni et al.	2026-09-28
HCLSM: Hierarchical Causal Latent State Machines for Object-Centric World Modeling	Jaber Jaber, Osama Jaber	2026-03-31
Persistent Robot World Models: Stabilizing Multi-Step Rollouts via Reinforcement Learning	Jai Bardhan, Patrik Drozdik et al.	2026-03-26
EVA: Aligning Video World Models with Executable Robot Actions via Inverse Dynamics Rewards	Ruixiang Wang, Qingming Liu et al.	2026-03-18
DreamPlan: Efficient Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Planners via Video World Models	Emily Yue-Ting Jia, Weiduo Yuan et al.	2026-03-17
Kinema4D: Kinematic 4D World Modeling for Spatiotemporal Embodied Simulation	Mutian Xu, Tianbao Zhang et al.	2026-03-17
PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play	Tenny Yin, Zhiting Mei et al.	2026-03-09

World Models — Driving & Navigation · 6 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
V2X-WAM: A Cooperative World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving	Junwei You, Weizhe Tang et al.	2026-09-29
EMPIRIC: Experiment-Driven Learning of Residual World Models for Robot Planning	Yichao Liang, Amber Li et al.	2026-09-28
Enhancing Policy Learning with World-Action Model	Yuci Han, Alper Yilmaz	2026-03-30
Latent-WAM: Latent World Action Modeling for End-to-End Autonomous Driving	Linbo Wang, Yupeng Zheng et al.	2026-03-25
NavThinker: Action-Conditioned World Models for Coupled Prediction and Planning in Social Navigation	Tianshuai Hu, Zeying Gong et al.	2026-03-16
AdaWorldPolicy: World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning for Robotic Manipulation	Ge Yuan, Qiyuan Qiao et al.	2026-02-23

Policies — Diffusion & Flow · 27 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Encoding Predictability and Legibility for Style-Conditioned Diffusion Policy	Adrien Jacquet Crétides, Mouad Abrini et al.	2026-03-17
ReMAP-DP: Reprojected Multi-view Aligned PointMaps for Diffusion Policy	Xinzhang Yang, Renjun Wu et al.	2026-03-16
REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning	Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen et al.	2026-03-14
PPGuide: Steering Diffusion Policies with Performance Predictive Guidance	Zixing Wang, Devesh K. Jha et al.	2026-03-11
SeedPolicy: Horizon Scaling via Self-Evolving Diffusion Policy for Robot Manipulation	Youqiang Gui, Yuxuan Zhou et al.	2026-03-05
Diffusion Policy through Conditional Proximal Policy Optimization	Ben Liu, Shunpeng Yang et al.	2026-03-05
Closed-Loop Action Chunks with Dynamic Corrections for Training-Free Diffusion Policy	Pengyuan Wu, Pingrui Zhang et al.	2026-03-02
ADM-DP: Adaptive Dynamic Modality Diffusion Policy through Vision-Tactile-Graph Fusion for Multi-Agent Manipulation	Enyi Wang, Wen Fan et al.	2026-02-25
Preference Aligned Visuomotor Diffusion Policies for Deformable Object Manipulation	Marco Moletta, Michael C. Welle et al.	2026-02-10
SERFN: Sample-Efficient Real-World Dexterous Policy Fine-Tuning via Action-Chunked Critics and Normalizing Flows	Chenyu Yang, Denis Tarasov et al.	2026-02-10
Trace-Focused Diffusion Policy for Multi-Modal Action Disambiguation in Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation	Yuxuan Hu, Xiangyu Chen et al.	2026-02-07
Moving On, Even When You're Broken: Fail-Active Trajectory Generation via Diffusion Policies Conditioned on Embodiment and Task	Gilberto G. Briscoe-Martinez, Yaashia Gautam et al.	2026-02-02
RoDiF: Robust Direct Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Policies with Corrupted Human Feedback	Amitesh Vatsa, Zhixian Xie et al.	2026-01-31
Self-Imitated Diffusion Policy for Efficient and Robust Visual Navigation	Runhua Zhang, Junyi Hou et al.	2026-01-30
Abstracting Robot Manipulation Skills via Mixture-of-Experts Diffusion Policies	Ce Hao, Xuanran Zhai et al.	2026-01-29
ForeDiffusion: Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion Policy via Future View Construction for Robot Manipulation	Weize Xie, Yi Ding et al.	2026-01-19
Sparse ActionGen: Accelerating Diffusion Policy with Real-time Pruning	Kangye Ji, Yuan Meng et al.	2026-01-19
CHDP: Cooperative Hybrid Diffusion Policies for Reinforcement Learning in Parameterized Action Space	Bingyi Liu, Jinbo He et al.	2026-01-09
Learning Diffusion Policy from Primitive Skills for Robot Manipulation	Zhihao Gu, Ming Yang et al.	2026-01-05
A Review of Online Diffusion Policy RL Algorithms for Scalable Robotic Control	Wonhyeok Choi, Shutong Ding et al.	2026-01-05
Flexible Multitask Learning with Factorized Diffusion Policy	Chaoqi Liu, Haonan Chen et al.	2025-12-26
Kinematics-Aware Diffusion Policy with Consistent 3D Observation and Action Space for Whole-Arm Robotic Manipulation	Kangchen Lv, Mingrui Yu et al.	2025-12-19
ISS Policy : Scalable Diffusion Policy with Implicit Scene Supervision	Wenlong Xia, Jinhao Zhang et al.	2025-12-17
Delay-Aware Diffusion Policy: Bridging the Observation-Execution Gap in Dynamic Tasks	Aileen Liao, Dong-Ki Kim et al.	2025-12-08
CAPE: Context-Aware Diffusion Policy Via Proximal Mode Expansion for Collision Avoidance	Rui Heng Yang, Xuan Zhao et al.	2025-11-27
Learning Diffusion Policies for Robotic Manipulation of Timber Joinery under Fabrication Uncertainty	Salma Mozaffari, Daniel Ruan et al.	2025-11-21
UltraDP: Generalizable Carotid Ultrasound Scanning with Force-Aware Diffusion Policy	Ruoqu Chen, Xiangjie Yan et al.	2025-11-19

Policies — Imitation & Behavior Learning · 10 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Bi-AQUA: Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning for Underwater Robot Arms via Lighting-Aware Action Chunking with Transformers	Takeru Tsunoori, Masato Kobayashi et al.	2025-11-20
Temporal Action Selection for Action Chunking	Yueyang Weng, Xiaopeng Zhang et al.	2025-11-06
FTACT: Force Torque aware Action Chunking Transformer for Pick-and-Reorient Bottle Task	Ryo Watanabe, Maxime Alvarez et al.	2025-09-27
Action Chunking with Transformers for Image-Based Spacecraft Guidance and Control	Alejandro Posadas-Nava, Andrea Scorsoglio et al.	2025-09-04
LiPo: A Lightweight Post-optimization Framework for Smoothing Action Chunks Generated by Learned Policies	Dongwoo Son, Suhan Park	2025-06-05
Bi-LAT: Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning via Natural Language and Action Chunking with Transformers	Takumi Kobayashi, Masato Kobayashi et al.	2025-04-02
Cross-Embodiment Robotic Manipulation Synthesis via Guided Demonstrations through CycleVAE and Human Behavior Transformer	Apan Dastider, Hao Fang et al.	2025-03-11
Memorized action chunking with Transformers: Imitation learning for vision-based tissue surface scanning	Bochen Yang, Kaizhong Deng et al.	2024-11-06
Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling	Yuejiang Liu, Jubayer Ibn Hamid et al.	2024-08-30
Surgical Robot Transformer (SRT): Imitation Learning for Surgical Tasks	Ji Woong Kim, Tony Z. Zhao et al.	2024-07-17

Policies — Robot Learning & Manipulation · 14 papers

Paper	Authors	Date	Links
Learning Multi-View Spatial Reasoning from Cross-View Relations	Suchae Jeong, Jaehwi Song et al.	2026-03-30
LILAC: Language-Conditioned Object-Centric Optical Flow for Open-Loop Trajectory Generation	Motonari Kambara, Koki Seno et al.	2026-03-26
Chunk-Boundary Artifact in Action-Chunked Generative Policies: A Noise-Sensitive Failure Mechanism	Rui Wang	2026-03-12
Real-Time Robot Execution with Masked Action Chunking	Haoxuan Wang, Gengyu Zhang et al.	2026-01-27
Actor-Critic for Continuous Action Chunks: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with Sparse Reward	Jiarui Yang, Bin Zhu et al.	2025-08-15
Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunking	Qiyang Li, Zhiyuan Zhou et al.	2025-07-10
Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies	Kevin Black, Manuel Y. Galliker et al.	2025-06-09
Learning Bimanual Manipulation via Action Chunking and Inter-Arm Coordination with Transformers	Tomohiro Motoda, Ryo Hanai et al.	2025-03-18
MissionGPT: Mission Planner for Mobile Robot based on Robotics Transformer Model	Vladimir Berman, Artem Bazhenov et al.	2024-11-07
VQ-ACE: Efficient Policy Search for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation via Action Chunking Embedding	Chenyu Yang, Davide Liconti et al.	2024-11-05
InterACT: Inter-dependency Aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers for Bimanual Manipulation	Andrew Lee, Ian Chuang et al.	2024-09-12
Bringing the RT-1-X Foundation Model to a SCARA robot	Jonathan Salzer, Arnoud Visser	2024-09-05
Logically Constrained Robotics Transformers for Enhanced Perception-Action Planning	Parv Kapoor, Sai Vemprala et al.	2024-08-09
SARA-RT: Scaling up Robotics Transformers with Self-Adaptive Robust Attention	Isabel Leal, Krzysztof Choromanski et al.	2023-12-04

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📋 Full Paper Index & Baselines

📊 Click to expand the complete paper list and baseline methods

The curated tables above highlight landmark and representative work. For the exhaustive, auto-maintained index and the baseline methods extracted from experimental tables, see:

• 📋 Complete Paper List — full index, sorted newest-first
• 📊 Baseline Methods — comparison methods from major VLA/WAM papers

Quick Reference (common baselines)

Family	Key baselines
VLA	RT-1, RT-2, OpenVLA, Octo, π0, π0.5, X-VLA, UniVLA, SmolVLA
Policy	Diffusion Policy, ACT, BeT, RoboFlamingo, CrossFormer
World Model	DreamerV3, I-JEPA, V-JEPA 2, Genie, Cosmos, GR-1/GR-2

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! To add or fix a paper:

1. Add a paper — open a PR placing it in the appropriate category (keep tables sorted newest-first), or open an issue with the arXiv link.
2. Fix an error — submit a PR with the correction.
3. New papers appear automatically — the 🆕 Latest Papers section and the 🗂️ Extended Paper Index are regenerated daily by the scraper; do not hand-edit content between the auto markers.

To run the discovery pipeline locally:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python scripts/arxiv_scraper.py --max-results 50 --days-back 30   # writes data/papers.json
python scripts/update_readme.py                                  # refreshes the 🆕 auto section
python scripts/expand_papers.py                                  # refreshes the 🗂️ extended index
python scripts/build_site.py                                     # rebuilds the GitHub Pages site (index.html)

License

Released under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

Inspired by awesome-vla-wam, awesome-physical-ai, and awesome-vla-study. Taxonomy grounded in the surveys listed above.

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