DECOWAM: Decoupled Whole-Body World-Action Model for Legged Mobile Manipulation

Abstract:Mobile manipulation requires a robot to predict how locomotion and arm motion jointly alter future observations and control. Existing world-action models, developed largely for fixed-base platforms, do not explicitly distinguish camera ego-motion from base and arm actions. Here we introduce DECOWAM, a whole-body world-action model that separates these factors through dedicated conditional interfaces. DECOWAM freezes an adapted FastWAM backbone and trains residual adapters, an action-equivalent future bottleneck distilled from privileged observations, adversarially separated base and arm latents, and base-velocity conditioning for video prediction. We further introduce ARMDOG, a real-robot dataset that synchronizes video, whole-body state and action, and language. On a fixed replay protocol, DECOWAM improved both future-video and action prediction over FastWAM, reducing action MSE by 21.7% with 25.95M trainable adaptation parameters. Across 79 closed-loop trials per method, it achieved the highest observed whole-body coordination and base-displacement robustness among the compared systems, while task completion remained comparable to the strongest baseline. These results show that embodiment-aware factorization can support parameter-efficient joint visual prediction and whole-body control under moving viewpoints.

8 pages, 5 figures. Introduces DECOWAM, a decoupled whole-body world-action model for legged mobile manipulation, and the ARMDOG real-robot dataset

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.20114 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.20114v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.20114 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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