AnyStep-WAM: Budget-Aligned Distillation and Adaptive Inference for World Action Models
cs.RO
Submitted: 2026-09-27
Updated: 2026-09-30
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: World-action models (WAMs) couple predictive visual modeling with action generation, typically relying on iterative denoising with a fixed denoising steps.
Terminology
Abstract
World-action models (WAMs) couple predictive visual modeling with action generation, typically relying on iterative denoising with a fixed denoising steps. However, manipulation tasks contain actions chunks with varying sensitivity to generation errors: critical actions require precision, while less sensitive actions allow faster generation with fewer denoising steps. Here we introduce AnyStep World Action Model, a general framework for tunable-budget prediction and scene-dependent computation allocation. Our budget-aligned teacher-trajectory distillation trains interval-conditioned flow maps using explicit frozen-teacher transitions and shared low-rank adapters, supporting action generation from one-step prediction to multi-step refinement. Building on this capability, a lightweight risk-benefit scheduler predicts teacher-curvature-based difficulty and budget-specific student-teacher fidelity from a single one-step preview, selecting the smallest budget predicted to satisfy risk-adaptive fidelity requirements. We evaluate our framework on three widely used WAMs Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA using RoboTwin 2.0. Our method reduces average denoising steps by 60.2%, 49.8%, and 85.28%, respectively, while maintaining baseline task success rates. In particular, our AnyStep training substantially improves model performance under a one-step denoising budget, increasing task success rates by 7.07%, 12.08%, and 8.94% on Motus, FastWAM, and LingBotVA, respectively. Experiments on six real-world manipulation tasks further validate its effectiveness.
Sources
- Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models
- Adaptive-WAM: Quality-Guided Early-Exit Planning from Intermediate Video-Diffusion Features
- RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
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- DSA: Dynamic Step Allocation for Fast Autoregressive Video Generation
- ELASTIC: Efficiently Learning to Adaptively Scale Test-Time Compute for Generative Control Policies
- Causal World Modeling for Robot Control
- Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
- Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference
- The Geometry of Flow-Matching Uncertainty: A Cost-free Uncertainty Proxy and Its Application in Flow-based VLA Failure Detection
- Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models
- ManiFlow: A General Robot Manipulation Policy via Consistency Flow Training
- Stable Velocity: A Variance Perspective on Flow Matching
- D3P: Dynamic Denoising Diffusion Policy via Reinforcement Learning
- Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?
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