Scalable Policy Evaluation with Video World Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tseng, Wei-Cheng, Gu, Jinwei, Zhang, Qinsheng, Mao, Hanzi, Liu, Ming-Yu, Shkurti, Florian, Yen-Chen, Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tseng, Wei-Cheng
Gu, Jinwei
Zhang, Qinsheng
Mao, Hanzi
Liu, Ming-Yu
Shkurti, Florian
Yen-Chen, Lin
author_facet Tseng, Wei-Cheng
Gu, Jinwei
Zhang, Qinsheng
Mao, Hanzi
Liu, Ming-Yu
Shkurti, Florian
Yen-Chen, Lin
contents Training generalist policies for robotic manipulation has shown great promise, as they enable language-conditioned, multi-task behaviors across diverse scenarios. However, evaluating these policies remains difficult because real-world testing is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. It also requires frequent environment resets and carries safety risks when deploying unproven policies on physical robots. Manually creating and populating simulation environments with assets for robotic manipulation has not addressed these issues, primarily due to the significant engineering effort required and the substantial sim-to-real gap, both in terms of physics and rendering. In this paper, we explore the use of action-conditional video generation models as a scalable way to learn world models for policy evaluation. We demonstrate how to incorporate action conditioning into existing pre-trained video generation models. This allows leveraging internet-scale in-the-wild online videos during the pre-training stage and alleviates the need for a large dataset of paired video-action data, which is expensive to collect for robotic manipulation. Our paper examines the effect of dataset diversity, pre-trained weights, and common failure cases for the proposed evaluation pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that across various metrics, including policy ranking and the correlation between actual policy values and predicted policy values, these models offer a promising approach for evaluating policies without requiring real-world interactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_11520
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Policy Evaluation with Video World Models
Tseng, Wei-Cheng
Gu, Jinwei
Zhang, Qinsheng
Mao, Hanzi
Liu, Ming-Yu
Shkurti, Florian
Yen-Chen, Lin
Robotics
Training generalist policies for robotic manipulation has shown great promise, as they enable language-conditioned, multi-task behaviors across diverse scenarios. However, evaluating these policies remains difficult because real-world testing is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. It also requires frequent environment resets and carries safety risks when deploying unproven policies on physical robots. Manually creating and populating simulation environments with assets for robotic manipulation has not addressed these issues, primarily due to the significant engineering effort required and the substantial sim-to-real gap, both in terms of physics and rendering. In this paper, we explore the use of action-conditional video generation models as a scalable way to learn world models for policy evaluation. We demonstrate how to incorporate action conditioning into existing pre-trained video generation models. This allows leveraging internet-scale in-the-wild online videos during the pre-training stage and alleviates the need for a large dataset of paired video-action data, which is expensive to collect for robotic manipulation. Our paper examines the effect of dataset diversity, pre-trained weights, and common failure cases for the proposed evaluation pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that across various metrics, including policy ranking and the correlation between actual policy values and predicted policy values, these models offer a promising approach for evaluating policies without requiring real-world interactions.
title Scalable Policy Evaluation with Video World Models
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11520