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arXiv · 2610.12285

PLaW-VLA: Predictive Latent World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Yu Liu·Hetian Guo·Tianlv Huang·Ziyi Cai·Wudi Chen·Hantang Wang·Qiutong Liu·Yingzhi Peng·Wei Han·Peijun Tang·Jianan Wang·Zipei Fan·Zhiyuan Zha·Xuan Song
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Abstract

Learning to predict how the world evolves can provide vision-language-action (VLA) policies with predictive context for long-horizon control, but its effectiveness depends on what future representation is modeled and how it conditions action generation. We introduce PLaW-VLA, which models task-relevant future states in a pretrained prediction-oriented representation space, reducing the need to predict control-irrelevant visual details. Built on a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PLaW-VLA conditions action generation on observation history, current task semantics, and predicted future states through structured causal attention. Experiments show a +11.8 percentage-point (pp) gain over reactive policies on RoboTwin Hard Horizon III and a +1.77 pp gain over reconstruction-oriented latent prediction on zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, supporting improved long-horizon control and generalization under distribution shift, respectively. By avoiding low-level visual reconstruction, PLaW-VLA lowers the burden of future prediction, enabling a lightweight latent world model with parallel future prediction and about 1/19 the inference latency of generative world-action modeling at comparable policy performance.

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Yu Liu, Hetian Guo, Tianlv Huang, Ziyi Cai, Wudi Chen, Hantang Wang, Qiutong Liu, Yingzhi Peng, Wei Han, Peijun Tang, Jianan Wang, Zipei Fan, Zhiyuan Zha, Xuan Song. 2026-10-08. PLaW-VLA: Predictive Latent World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Policies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12285

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