PLaW-VLA: Predictive Latent World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Abstract:Learning to predict how the world evolves can provide vision-language-action (VLA) policies with predictive context for long-horizon control, but its effectiveness depends on what future representation is modeled and how it conditions action generation. We introduce PLaW-VLA, which models task-relevant future states in a pretrained prediction-oriented representation space, reducing the need to predict control-irrelevant visual details. Built on a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PLaW-VLA conditions action generation on observation history, current task semantics, and predicted future states through structured causal attention. Experiments show a +11.8 percentage-point (pp) gain over reactive policies on RoboTwin Hard Horizon III and a +1.77 pp gain over reconstruction-oriented latent prediction on zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, supporting improved long-horizon control and generalization under distribution shift, respectively. By avoiding low-level visual reconstruction, PLaW-VLA lowers the burden of future prediction, enabling a lightweight latent world model with parallel future prediction and about 1/19 the inference latency of generative world-action modeling at comparable policy performance.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.12285 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.12285v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12285 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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