Q-WAM: 4-Bit Quantization of World Action Models with Action-Subspace Protection
cs.RO, cs.CV
Submitted: 2026-09-27
Updated: 2026-09-27
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: World Action Models (WAMs) jointly generate video and robot actions through iterative diffusion and perform strongly in robotic manipulation.
Terminology
Abstract
World Action Models (WAMs) jointly generate video and robot actions through iterative diffusion and perform strongly in robotic manipulation. However, their prohibitive compute and memory costs pose substantial deployment challenges. Post-training quantization (PTQ) can reduce these costs, but existing PTQ methods such as smoothing and rotation are insufficient to maintain the precision of action generation. To overcome this limitation, we propose Q-WAM, a new 4-bit weight-activation quantization for WAMs that preserves the actions the model generates. Specifically, we introduce the Action Observability Gramian (AOG), which measures how much rounding errors in each weighted combination of a layer's input channels change the final action through all denoising steps. We also develop Action-Subspace Protection (ASP), which keeps the few most action-sensitive channel combinations in a tiny 16-bit low-rank branch and quantizes the complementary weights and activations to 4 bits, both as dense matrix multiplications that run efficiently on GPUs. Finally, to preserve action quality with minimal overhead, we identify the experts that matter most for the generated action by aggregating the AOG-derived action mass across the layers of each expert and apply ASP only to those experts. We evaluate Q-WAM on three WAMs, both in simulation and in real-world deployment. On the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark, it reaches 89.6--93.0% average success rate, within 1.1 percentage points of the 16-bit models, while reducing the memory of the quantized blocks by 3.1--3.4 times. Our method outperforms the strongest baseline, SVDQuant, by 2.5--8.7 percentage points. On a Unitree G1 humanoid and a bimanual UR3 robot, it improves success over SVDQuant by 12.8-17.6 percentage points.
Sources
- ActQuant: Sub-4-bit Action-Guided Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models
- Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models
- QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs
- Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model
- WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model
- RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
- GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers
- Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning
- Causal World Modeling for Robot Control
- SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models
- Q-Diffusion: Quantizing Diffusion Models
- BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction
- Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Models
- AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration
- Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
- SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotations
- DIDO: Distilling Interaction-Centric Dynamics into One-Step Denoising for World Action Models
- Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?
- PTQ4DiT: Post-training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers
- SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models
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