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Main Authors: Li, Quanyi, Feng, Lan, Zhang, Haonan, Li, Wuyang, Wang, Letian, Alahi, Alexandre, Soh, Harold
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11751
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author Li, Quanyi
Feng, Lan
Zhang, Haonan
Li, Wuyang
Wang, Letian
Alahi, Alexandre
Soh, Harold
author_facet Li, Quanyi
Feng, Lan
Zhang, Haonan
Li, Wuyang
Wang, Letian
Alahi, Alexandre
Soh, Harold
contents In Model Predictive Control (MPC), world models predict the future outcomes of various action proposals, which are then scored to guide the selection of the optimal action. For visuomotor MPC, the score function is a distance metric between a predicted image and a goal image, measured in the latent space of a pretrained vision encoder like DINO and JEPA. However, it is challenging to obtain the goal image in advance of the task execution, particularly in new environments. Additionally, conveying the goal through an image offers limited interactivity compared with natural language. In this work, we propose to learn a Grounded World Model (GWM) in a vision-language-aligned latent space. As a result, each proposed action is scored based on how close its future outcome is to the task instruction, reflected by the similarity of embeddings. This approach transforms the visuomotor MPC to a VLA that surpasses VLM-based VLAs in semantic generalization. On the proposed WISER benchmark, GWM-MPC achieves a 87% success rate on the test set comprising 288 tasks that feature unseen visual signals and referring expressions, yet remain solvable with motions demonstrated during training. In contrast, traditional VLAs achieve an average success rate of 22%, even though they overfit the training set with a 90% success rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11751
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grounded World Model for Semantically Generalizable Planning
Li, Quanyi
Feng, Lan
Zhang, Haonan
Li, Wuyang
Wang, Letian
Alahi, Alexandre
Soh, Harold
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
In Model Predictive Control (MPC), world models predict the future outcomes of various action proposals, which are then scored to guide the selection of the optimal action. For visuomotor MPC, the score function is a distance metric between a predicted image and a goal image, measured in the latent space of a pretrained vision encoder like DINO and JEPA. However, it is challenging to obtain the goal image in advance of the task execution, particularly in new environments. Additionally, conveying the goal through an image offers limited interactivity compared with natural language. In this work, we propose to learn a Grounded World Model (GWM) in a vision-language-aligned latent space. As a result, each proposed action is scored based on how close its future outcome is to the task instruction, reflected by the similarity of embeddings. This approach transforms the visuomotor MPC to a VLA that surpasses VLM-based VLAs in semantic generalization. On the proposed WISER benchmark, GWM-MPC achieves a 87% success rate on the test set comprising 288 tasks that feature unseen visual signals and referring expressions, yet remain solvable with motions demonstrated during training. In contrast, traditional VLAs achieve an average success rate of 22%, even though they overfit the training set with a 90% success rate.
title Grounded World Model for Semantically Generalizable Planning
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11751