Jiaju Yin | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

TS-WAM: Temporal Latent Actions and World-Action Coupling for Vision-Language Robot Control

Many vision-language-action policies rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations and lack an explicit mechanism for predicting future visual states. These limitations hinder learning from action-free videos and can encourage overfitting to demonstration conditions, weakening generalization and robustness. We present TS-WAM, a lightweight Teacher-Student World-Action Model that addresses these challenges through self-supervised temporal learning and explicit future prediction. Its vlm-jepa framework learns from heterogeneous data, including robot demonstrations and action-free human videos, using an EMA target branch without requiring a separately trained external teacher. By coupling vlm-jepa with delta-lwm, TS-WAM learns to predict latent actions from the current observation and instruction and uses them to predict future visual features that guide action generation at inference. A unified end-to-end training architecture jointly optimizes temporal representation learning, visual dynamics, and robot control without a separate latent-action or world-model pretraining stage. The EMA target branch is removed at inference, keeping the deployed policy lightweight. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, together with real-world manipulation experiments on Franka Research 3 and RevoTron, demonstrate that TS-WAM achieves strong manipulation performance, generalization, and robustness.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

How to Learn from What a Human Would Avoid? Intervention-Aware World Models with Real-World RL for Dexterous Manipulation

Multi-fingered dexterous manipulation remains a frontier for real-world reinforcement learning (RL) due to the high-dimensional action space and the prohibitive cost of hardware failures. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) RL allows operators to intervene before failures occur, current pipelines often treat these interventions as reactive corrections, discarding the rich safety signal inherent in the operator's decision to take control. In this paper, we ask: How can we learn from what a human would avoid? We present WHIRL, a safety-aware RL framework that transforms binary human interventions into forward-predictive signals for proactive risk avoidance. Our approach centers on an intervention-aware latent world model with four prediction heads: dynamics, reward, termination, and a novel per-state intervention-probability head that learns to predict the likelihood of a human takeover at future states. This head provides an actor-side risk-shaping term that discourages the policy from entering "intervention-prone" regions, modeling the operator's internal safety threshold. We evaluate our framework on a 16-DoF LEAP Hand across tasks spanning convex and irregular object grasping, prismatic manipulation, and long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Our results show that predictive risk-shaping enables the system to achieve a 96.7 percent success rate on complex grasping tasks while reducing the operator intervention burden by up to 84 percent in step-weighted terms. By closing the loop between human intuition and predictive world modeling, this work provides a practical safety-aware recipe for training complex dexterous agents in the real world while reducing operator fatigue and hardware-risk exposure.

cs.RO↗