HiLo-WAM: Decoupling Long-Horizon Task Evolution and Local Dynamics in World Action Models

arXiv:2611.05023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) improve robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual dynamics and robot actions. However, most existing WAMs model dense short-horizon visual dynamics, capturing local interactions but providing limited long-range task context. Extending prediction horizons increases uncertainty and computation while entangling task-level evolution with fine-grained local dynamics, obscuring their dependencies and distinct roles in action generation. We propose HiLo-WAM, which decouples long-horizon task evolution from local visual dynamics while jointly modeling their interaction with robot actions. A sparse long-horizon visual stream captures historical task context and future evolution, while a dense local dynamics visual stream models short-horizon robot-object interactions. The two streams operate at different temporal scales within a unified dual-DiT architecture and guide actions through structured cross-stream attention. Progressive inference further reduces unnecessary computation through stream-wise partial denoising, joint denoising, and dynamic skipping. Experiments demonstrate strong long-horizon manipulation performance: HiLo-WAM achieves a 93.70% average success rate on RoboTwin 2.0 and a 17.43 progress score on RoboDojo long-horizon tasks, with robust in-domain and OOD performance on the Fourier GR-3 robot. Ablations confirm the complementary contributions of long-horizon task evolution and local interaction dynamics, while temporal-scale analyses highlight the importance of balancing temporal coverage and resolution. Progressive inference further achieves a 2.93x speedup while improving performance.