UniWALM: Unified World Action Language Model for Embodied Robot Control

arXiv:2610.28626 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV · Submitted 2026-10-20 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-10-20

Updated: 2026-10-20

Comments: Preprint: 25 pages

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The gist: Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in

Abstract

Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, where each modality is both a conditioning signal and a supervision target. We ask: can jointly generating language enrich this shared representation, improving manipulation and supporting memory-dependent behavior? Unlike prior approaches that attach a reasoning or vision-language model to a video-action backbone and run them as distinct stages, UniWALM unifies all three modalities inside a single mixture-of-transformers backbone whose per-modality diffusion heads co-denoise synchronously, decoding subtask and textual memory in the same pass as action with no separate planning stage; the generated language is re-consumed on the next step, closing a language-as-memory loop without an external planner or memory bank. To keep the action stream reliable under this richer objective, we further introduce Flow Matching with Correction (FMC), a training objective that teaches recovery from perturbed action trajectories at no inference-time cost. UniWALM consistently improves over same-backbone baselines (e.g., FastWAM) on compositional pick-and-place (MolmoSpaces) and across the memory-dependent subset of RMBench, where it reaches 34.5% without any pretrained language or reasoning model and exceeds Mem-0's keyframe-equipped setup (28.5%) using only a single anchor frame. On a real-world Find-the-Item task, generating textual memory lifts success from 11.1% to 61.1%, while state-of-the-art VLAs stay at or below chance (<=33.3%).

Related papers