World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies
About
State-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at semantic generalization but struggle to generalize to unseen physical motions in novel environments. We introduce DreamZero, a World Action Model (WAM) built upon a pretrained video diffusion backbone. Unlike VLAs, WAMs learn physical dynamics by predicting future world states and actions, using video as a dense representation of how the world evolves. By jointly modeling video and action, DreamZero learns diverse skills effectively from heterogeneous robot data without relying on repetitive demonstrations. This results in over 2x improvement in generalization to new tasks and environments compared to state-of-the-art VLAs in real robot experiments. Crucially, through model and system optimizations, we enable a 14B autoregressive video diffusion model to perform real-time closed-loop control at 7Hz. Finally, we demonstrate two forms of cross-embodiment transfer: video-only demonstrations from other robots or humans yield a relative improvement of over 42% on unseen task performance with just 10-20 minutes of data. More surprisingly, DreamZero enables few-shot embodiment adaptation, transferring to a new embodiment with only 30 minutes of play data while retaining zero-shot generalization.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robotic Manipulation | SimFoundry Simulation | Success Rate92 | 29 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | SimFoundry Real | Success Rate100 | 29 | |
| Robot Manipulation | RoboCasa-GR1 24 tasks | Average Success Rate62.4 | 16 | |
| Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation | RoboVoLo Common Sense Suite | Infer Rate19.05 | 11 | |
| Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation | RoboVoLo Memory Suite | Order Score29.17 | 11 | |
| Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation | Robolab-Vague | Success Rate (Easy)19.79 | 11 | |
| Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation | RoboVoLo Complex References Suite | Spatial Performance11.11 | 11 | |
| Robot Picking | Pick MSProc sim | Success Rate52.1 | 11 | |
| Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation | RoboVoLo World Knowledge Suite | Art Success Rate0.00e+0 | 11 | |
| Clear Table | Polaris | Success Rate16 | 10 |