SmolWAM: A Latent World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devices
cs.RO, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-09
Updated: 2026-10-09
Comments: Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Robot Learning with World Models Workshop. Code: https://github.com/iitimii/SmolWAM Project: https://smolwam.vercel.app/
Code: https://github.com/iitimii/SmolWAM
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: World-action models (WAMs) predict a robot's actions together with the observations those actions will produce.
Terminology
Abstract
World-action models (WAMs) predict a robot's actions together with the observations those actions will produce. However, the strongest models rely on video diffusion transformers that are far too computationally expensive for resource-constrained edge devices. We present SmolWAM, a latent WAM that we derive from the 2B-parameter Cosmos Policy by keeping its pretrained trunk and rebuilding its inference interface: single-frame visual latents, cached text features that preserve the trunk's attention sinks, 12 of 28 transformer blocks, and 1,008 tokens from which actions and future visual latents are read out in one rectified-flow step. Trained in 3.6 GPU-hours, SmolWAM succeeds in 95.5% of 400 LIBERO episodes at 57 ms and 2.3 TFLOP per 16-action chunk with 2.4 GiB of GPU memory, 11x faster than its teacher with 18.5x fewer FLOPs and 3.2x less memory, and its world head still forecasts scene motion.
Sources
- V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning
- Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies
- RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control
- WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model
- ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model
- Fast LeWorldModel
- Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network
- Light-WAM: Efficient World Action Models with State-Fusion Action Decoding
- OA-WAM: Object-Addressable World Action Model for Robust Robot Manipulation
- LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels
- Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
- Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI
- SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics
- Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models
- TurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM
- World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies
- Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?
- $\tau_0$-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation
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