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When to Trust Imagination: Adaptive Action Execution for World Action Models

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World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly predicting future visual observations and future actions. However, current WAMs typically execute a fixed number of predicted actions after each model inference, leaving the robot blind to whether the imagined future remains consistent with the actual physical rollout. In this work, we formulate adaptive WAM execution as a future-reality verification problem: the robot should execute longer when the WAM-predicted future remains reliable, and replan earlier when reality deviates from imagination. To this end, we propose Future Forward Dynamics Causal Attention (FFDC), a lightweight verifier that jointly reasons over predicted future actions, predicted visual dynamics, real observations, and language instructions to estimate whether the remaining action rollout can still be trusted. FFDC enables adaptive action chunk sizes as an emergent consequence of prediction-observation consistency, preserving the efficiency of long-horizon execution while restoring responsiveness in contact-rich or difficult phases. We further introduce Mixture-of-Horizon Training to improve long-horizon trajectory coverage for adaptive execution. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and in the real world demonstrate that our method achieves a strong robustness-efficiency trade-off: on RoboTwin, it reduces WAM forward passes by 69.10% and execution time by 34.02%, while improving success rate by 2.54% over the short-chunk baseline; in real-world experiments, it improves success rate by 35%.

Rui Wang, Yue Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Kuncheng Luo, Jianan Wang, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin Easy
Average Success Rate (AVG)89.51
10
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin Rand.hard
Success Rate (%)76.4
6
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin Clean.hard
Success Rate (%)76
6
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin (Rand.avg)
Success Rate (%)88.2
6
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin Clean.avg
Success Rate88.9
6
Robotic ManipulationRoboTwin Clean.easy
Success Rate (SR)90.33
6
Carrot to bagReal-World (test)--
4
pick banana and placeReal-World (test)
SR80
2
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