World SLAM Model: Joint World Modeling for SLAM and Navigation

Abstract:We introduce World SLAM Model (WSM), a unified framework that brings the SLAM paradigm directly into downstream navigation. Rather than treating SLAM merely as an upstream module that provides poses, maps or tokens, WSM adopts its core mechanisms, including incremental state updates with persistent memory and backend refinement of accumulated errors, to maintain a consistent world state during interaction. Given the current observation and a navigation goal, WSM predicts future visual states and jointly estimates their camera motion and dense geometry, grounding visual prediction in an evolving spatial world state. This spatial state is continuously updated as new observations arrive and provides the basis for action generation and closed-loop navigation. WSM is trained end-to-end with a joint navigation--SLAM objective, enabling downstream navigation to benefit directly from SLAM-style state maintenance and refinement while preserving accurate geometric estimation. Experiments demonstrate improved navigation performance together with strong SLAM accuracy, highlighting the potential of SLAM as an intrinsic mechanism for long-horizon world modeling and embodied interaction.

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2609.32626 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.32626v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32626 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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