Say, Dream, and Act: Learning Video World Models for Instruction-Driven Robot Manipulation

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Authors: Songen Gu, Yunuo Cai, Tianyu Wang, Simo Wu, Yanwei Fu
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Robotic manipulation requires anticipating how the environment evolves in response to actions, yet most existing systems lack this predictive capability, often resulting in errors and inefficiency. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide high-level guidance, they cannot explicitly forecast future states, and existing world models either predict only short horizons or produce spatially inconsistent frames. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for fast and predictive video-conditioned action. Our approach first selects and adapts a robust video generation model to ensure reliable future predictions, then applies adversarial distillation for fast, few-step video generation, and finally trains an action model that leverages both generated videos and real observations to correct spatial errors. Extensive experiments show that our method produces temporally coherent, spatially accurate video predictions that directly support precise manipulation, achieving significant improvements in embodiment consistency, spatial referring ability, and task completion over existing baselines. Codes & Models will be released.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Robot Manipulation and Learning Reinforcement Learning in Robotics Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
11 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint