Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2608.08023

4D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields

Abstract

Building on recent advances in world models, World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model video prediction and action generation. However, they typically represent videos in 2D pixel space, creating a representation gap with 3D space in which robotic actions are executed. Recent 3D approaches introduce 3D information, but fail to fully exploit the dynamics of 3D structures. In this work, we propose 4D-WAM, a model-agnostic training strategy that injects spatiotemporal knowledge from 3D trajectory fields into WAMs through representation alignment. To this end, we introduce two complementary objectives: 1) motion alignment, which aligns temporal feature variations across adjacent frames and encourages the model to build local 4D awareness during training, and 2) destination alignment, which guides the model to infer the final destination from the source frame by minimizing the gap between their attention-like similarity distributions. Together, these objectives provide both local motion supervision and long-horizon goal guidance, enabling WAMs to learn trajectory-level spatiotemporal representations. Extensive in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments across different base models demonstrate the model's improvements in spatial understanding, execution precision, robustness, generalization, and versatility.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Lishan Yang, Wenxuan Song, Xi Wang, Pingyue Sheng, Zheng Fang, Ziyang Zhou, Junjie He, Haodong Yan, Jiayi Chen, Nan Sun, Qiao Sun, Pengwei Wang, Lingqiao Liu, Yan Wang, Yuxiang Gao, Feras Dayoub, Haoang Li. 2026-08-12. 4D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08023

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

J-PARSE: Jacobian-based Projection Algorithm for Resolving Singularities Effectively in Inverse Kinematic Control of Serial Manipulators

J-PARSE is an algorithm for smooth first-order inverse kinematic control of a serial manipulator near kinematic singularities. The commanded end-effector velocity is interpreted component-wise, according to the available mobility in each dimension of the task space. First, a substitute ''Safety'' Jacobian matrix is created, keeping the aspect ratio of the manipulability ellipsoid above a threshold value. The desired velocity is then projected onto non-singular and singular directions, and the latter projection scaled down by a factor informed by the altered mobility. A right-inverse of the non-singular Safety Jacobian is applied to the modified command. In the absence of joint limits and collisions, this ensures safe transition into and out of low-mobility configurations, guaranteeing locally stable reaching behavior towards target poses within, on the boundary of, and outside the workspace. The behavior is further guaranteed to be locally asymptotically stable if the starting and target configurations are not exactly singular, even if they are nearly singular. Velocity control with J-PARSE is benchmarked against approaches from the literature, illustrating its use of a single tuning parameter to simultaneously achieve high reaching accuracy and stable behavior. Applications in teleoperation, servoing, and learning are demonstrated. Videos and code are available at https://jparse-manip.github.io/.

cs.RO

NeMo-map: Neural Implicit Flow Fields for Spatio-Temporal Motion Mapping

Safe and efficient robot operation in complex human environments can benefit from good models of site-specific motion patterns. Maps of Dynamics (MoDs) provide such models by encoding statistical motion patterns in a map, but existing representations use discrete spatial sampling and typically require costly offline construction. We propose a continuous spatio-temporal MoD representation based on implicit neural functions that directly map coordinates to the parameters of a Semi-Wrapped Gaussian Mixture Model. This removes the need for discretization and imputation for unevenly sampled regions, enabling smooth generalization across both space and time. Evaluated on two public datasets with real-world people tracking data, our method achieves better accuracy of motion representation and smoother velocity distributions in sparse regions while still being computationally efficient, compared to available baselines. The proposed approach demonstrates a powerful and efficient way of modeling complex human motion patterns and high performance in the trajectory prediction downstream task. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/test-bai-cpu/nemo-map.

cs.RO

Spatiotemporal Calibration of Doppler Velocity Logs for Underwater Robots

The calibration of extrinsic parameters and clock offsets between sensors for high-accuracy performance in underwater SLAM systems remains insufficiently explored. Existing methods for Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) calibration are either constrained to specific sensor configurations or rely on oversimplified assumptions, and none jointly estimate translational extrinsics and time offsets. We propose a Unified Iterative Calibration (UIC) framework for general DVL sensor setups, formulated as a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation with a Gaussian Process (GP) motion prior for high-fidelity motion interpolation. UIC alternates between efficient GP-based motion state updates and gradient-based calibration variable updates, supported by a provably statistically consistent sequential initialization scheme. The proposed UIC can be applied to IMU, cameras and other modalities as co-sensors. We release an open-source DVL-camera calibration toolbox. Beyond underwater applications, several aspects of UIC-such as the integration of GP priors for MAP-based calibration and the design of provably reliable initialization procedures-are broadly applicable to other multi-sensor calibration problems. Finally, simulations and real-world tests validate our approach.

cs.RO