English

World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies

Robotics 2026-02-19 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

State-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at semantic generalization but struggle to generalize to unseen physical motions in novel environments. We introduce DreamZero, a World Action Model (WAM) built upon a pretrained video diffusion backbone. Unlike VLAs, WAMs learn physical dynamics by predicting future world states and actions, using video as a dense representation of how the world evolves. By jointly modeling video and action, DreamZero learns diverse skills effectively from heterogeneous robot data without relying on repetitive demonstrations. This results in over 2x improvement in generalization to new tasks and environments compared to state-of-the-art VLAs in real robot experiments. Crucially, through model and system optimizations, we enable a 14B autoregressive video diffusion model to perform real-time closed-loop control at 7Hz. Finally, we demonstrate two forms of cross-embodiment transfer: video-only demonstrations from other robots or humans yield a relative improvement of over 42% on unseen task performance with just 10-20 minutes of data. More surprisingly, DreamZero enables few-shot embodiment adaptation, transferring to a new embodiment with only 30 minutes of play data while retaining zero-shot generalization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.15922,
  title  = {World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies},
  author = {Seonghyeon Ye and Yunhao Ge and Kaiyuan Zheng and Shenyuan Gao and Sihyun Yu and George Kurian and Suneel Indupuru and You Liang Tan and Chuning Zhu and Jiannan Xiang and Ayaan Malik and Kyungmin Lee and William Liang and Nadun Ranawaka and Jiasheng Gu and Yinzhen Xu and Guanzhi Wang and Fengyuan Hu and Avnish Narayan and Johan Bjorck and Jing Wang and Gwanghyun Kim and Dantong Niu and Ruijie Zheng and Yuqi Xie and Jimmy Wu and Qi Wang and Ryan Julian and Danfei Xu and Yilun Du and Yevgen Chebotar and Scott Reed and Jan Kautz and Yuke Zhu and Linxi "Jim" Fan and Joel Jang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15922},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project page: https://dreamzero0.github.io/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:40:28.178Z