WAM-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for World Action Models

arXiv:2608.22364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World action models (WAMs) couple visual future prediction with robot action generation, but accelerated students can lose task capabilities during distillation and later encounter states that are poorly represented by offline data. We study whether on-policy distillation (OPD) can repair such a student without requiring sparse-reward reinforcement learning. We introduce WAM-OPD, a deployment-consistent post-training recipe for a video-first WAM. The student acts in the environment and therefore determines the history distribution. A frozen teacher labels those student histories with coherent video and action targets, while the student action branch is trained under its own generated video plan, as it is at deployment. Joint video and action losses update lightweight adapters in the shared backbone, together with an action flow-matching regularizer. In preliminary RoboTwin 2.0 studies on two tasks, the released one-video/one-action-step Flash-WAM improves from 0.0% to 58.3% success on HANDOVER MIC, and from 16.7% to 33.3% on PUT OBJECT CABINET. These task-specific results are an initial capability proof rather than evidence of broad or uniform generalization. They nevertheless suggest that dense teacher supervision on student-induced histories is a promising post-training interface for video-first WAMs.

Abstract:World action models (WAMs) couple visual future prediction with robot action generation, but accelerated students can lose task capabilities during distillation and later encounter states that are poorly represented by offline data. We study whether on-policy distillation (OPD) can repair such a student without requiring sparse-reward reinforcement learning. We introduce WAM-OPD, a deployment-consistent post-training recipe for a video-first WAM. The student acts in the environment and therefore determines the history distribution. A frozen teacher labels those student histories with coherent video and action targets, while the student action branch is trained under its own generated video plan, as it is at deployment. Joint video and action losses update lightweight adapters in the shared backbone, together with an action flow-matching regularizer. In preliminary RoboTwin 2.0 studies on two tasks, the released one-video/one-action-step Flash-WAM improves from 0.0% to 58.3% success on HANDOVER MIC, and from 16.7% to 33.3% on PUT OBJECT CABINET. These task-specific results are an initial capability proof rather than evidence of broad or uniform generalization. They nevertheless suggest that dense teacher supervision on student-induced histories is a promising post-training interface for video-first WAMs.

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

arXiv:2608.22364 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.22364v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22364 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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WAM-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for World Action Models

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