World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Fangyuan, Wang, Ziyuan, Pei, Guorui, Zhang, Mengshi, Liang, Canxi, Hu, Jun, Li, Zhongxuan, Wu, Jinsong, Han, Ning, Zhang, Zeqing, Qi, Jiaming, Wu, Hongmin, Zhang, Shiyao, Zheng, Pai, Pan, Jia, Navarro-Alarcon, David, Liu, Sichao, Zhou, Peng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wang, Fangyuan
Wang, Ziyuan
Pei, Guorui
Zhang, Mengshi
Liang, Canxi
Hu, Jun
Li, Zhongxuan
Wu, Jinsong
Han, Ning
Zhang, Zeqing
Qi, Jiaming
Wu, Hongmin
Zhang, Shiyao
Zheng, Pai
Pan, Jia
Navarro-Alarcon, David
Liu, Sichao
Zhou, Peng
author_facet Wang, Fangyuan
Wang, Ziyuan
Pei, Guorui
Zhang, Mengshi
Liang, Canxi
Hu, Jun
Li, Zhongxuan
Wu, Jinsong
Han, Ning
Zhang, Zeqing
Qi, Jiaming
Wu, Hongmin
Zhang, Shiyao
Zheng, Pai
Pan, Jia
Navarro-Alarcon, David
Liu, Sichao
Zhou, Peng
contents Robotic manipulation depends on the ability to anticipate how actions reshape objects, contacts, and scene geometry before execution. Learned world models provide this capability by predicting task-relevant future evolution under robot intervention, yet the term now spans latent dynamics models, action-conditioned video generators, three- and four-dimensional scene predictors, physics-informed simulators, and predictive modules inside vision-language-action systems. This breadth has fragmented the literature and obscured the design choices that matter for manipulation. We survey world models for robotic manipulation through three questions: what future representation is predicted, how prediction is connected to action, and when prediction is used in the robot-learning pipeline. We operationally define a world model as an action-conditioned predictive system and distinguish it from perception modules, inverse models, policies, rewards, and value functions. We then organize existing work into five representation families, develop a functional taxonomy that separates integrated prediction-action models from explicit predictive planners, and characterize infrastructure roles including synthetic experience generation, candidate filtering, search-based evaluation, learned environments, and outcome verification. We further map these roles across pretraining, post-training, and inference adaptation, review 34 manipulation datasets, and synthesize evaluation protocols for predictive fidelity, task performance, and simulator reliability. This survey shows that world models are evolving from task-specific dynamics predictors into predictive infrastructure for robot learning, while exposing open challenges in contact modeling, hallucination control, action alignment, and benchmarking under closed-loop use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
Wang, Fangyuan
Wang, Ziyuan
Pei, Guorui
Zhang, Mengshi
Liang, Canxi
Hu, Jun
Li, Zhongxuan
Wu, Jinsong
Han, Ning
Zhang, Zeqing
Qi, Jiaming
Wu, Hongmin
Zhang, Shiyao
Zheng, Pai
Pan, Jia
Navarro-Alarcon, David
Liu, Sichao
Zhou, Peng
Robotics
Robotic manipulation depends on the ability to anticipate how actions reshape objects, contacts, and scene geometry before execution. Learned world models provide this capability by predicting task-relevant future evolution under robot intervention, yet the term now spans latent dynamics models, action-conditioned video generators, three- and four-dimensional scene predictors, physics-informed simulators, and predictive modules inside vision-language-action systems. This breadth has fragmented the literature and obscured the design choices that matter for manipulation. We survey world models for robotic manipulation through three questions: what future representation is predicted, how prediction is connected to action, and when prediction is used in the robot-learning pipeline. We operationally define a world model as an action-conditioned predictive system and distinguish it from perception modules, inverse models, policies, rewards, and value functions. We then organize existing work into five representation families, develop a functional taxonomy that separates integrated prediction-action models from explicit predictive planners, and characterize infrastructure roles including synthetic experience generation, candidate filtering, search-based evaluation, learned environments, and outcome verification. We further map these roles across pretraining, post-training, and inference adaptation, review 34 manipulation datasets, and synthesize evaluation protocols for predictive fidelity, task performance, and simulator reliability. This survey shows that world models are evolving from task-specific dynamics predictors into predictive infrastructure for robot learning, while exposing open challenges in contact modeling, hallucination control, action alignment, and benchmarking under closed-loop use.
title World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00113