Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Xinyu, Xu, Zhengtong, Tao, Yutian, Wang, Yeping, She, Yu, Boularias, Abdeslam
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zhang, Xinyu
Xu, Zhengtong
Tao, Yutian
Wang, Yeping
She, Yu
Boularias, Abdeslam
author_facet Zhang, Xinyu
Xu, Zhengtong
Tao, Yutian
Wang, Yeping
She, Yu
Boularias, Abdeslam
contents World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07079
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action
Zhang, Xinyu
Xu, Zhengtong
Tao, Yutian
Wang, Yeping
She, Yu
Boularias, Abdeslam
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm
title Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07079