World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hou, Bohan, Li, Gen, Jia, Jindou, An, Tuo, Guo, Xinying, Leng, Sicong, Geng, Haoran, Ze, Yanjie, Harada, Tatsuya, Torr, Philip, Mees, Oier, Pollefeys, Marc, Liu, Zhuang, Wu, Jiajun, Abbeel, Pieter, Malik, Jitendra, Du, Yilun, Yang, Jianfei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918476946341888
author Hou, Bohan
Li, Gen
Jia, Jindou
An, Tuo
Guo, Xinying
Leng, Sicong
Geng, Haoran
Ze, Yanjie
Harada, Tatsuya
Torr, Philip
Mees, Oier
Pollefeys, Marc
Liu, Zhuang
Wu, Jiajun
Abbeel, Pieter
Malik, Jitendra
Du, Yilun
Yang, Jianfei
author_facet Hou, Bohan
Li, Gen
Jia, Jindou
An, Tuo
Guo, Xinying
Leng, Sicong
Geng, Haoran
Ze, Yanjie
Harada, Tatsuya
Torr, Philip
Mees, Oier
Pollefeys, Marc
Liu, Zhuang
Wu, Jiajun
Abbeel, Pieter
Malik, Jitendra
Du, Yilun
Yang, Jianfei
contents World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
Hou, Bohan
Li, Gen
Jia, Jindou
An, Tuo
Guo, Xinying
Leng, Sicong
Geng, Haoran
Ze, Yanjie
Harada, Tatsuya
Torr, Philip
Mees, Oier
Pollefeys, Marc
Liu, Zhuang
Wu, Jiajun
Abbeel, Pieter
Malik, Jitendra
Du, Yilun
Yang, Jianfei
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.
title World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00080