Bridge-WA: Predicting Where and How the World Changes for Robotic Action
About
General-purpose vision-language-action models benefit from large vision-language priors, but effective manipulation also requires anticipating action-relevant scene changes. Existing world-action models often rely on large generative world models or dense future rollouts, which are expensive and spend capacity on visual details weakly coupled to control. We present Bridge-WA, a lightweight world-action framework that distills a frozen future-change teacher into three compact priors: future tokens for intended outcomes, change maps for intervention support, and motion-flow maps for local transition direction. A WorldBridge conditions the action transformer on these priors through multi-source attention memories and spatial-temporal biases, while the teacher model is removed at inference. Across VLABench, RoboTwin2.0, LIBERO-Plus and real-robot evaluations, Bridge-WA improves task success, progress, and robustness, with particularly clear gains under out-of-distribution visual shifts. By focusing action generation on where and how the scene will change, Bridge-WA suppresses nuisance appearance factors such as background, lighting, and distractors, leading to better generalization without deployment-time dense future-image generation. Code and visualizations are available at: https://hcplab-sysu.github.io/BRIDGE-WA .
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robotic Manipulation | LIBERO-Plus | Language Understanding Score77.2 | 414 | |
| Robotic Manipulation Reasoning | VLABench | In Distribution Accuracy78 | 9 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | VLABench Common Sense (test) | IS74.2 | 5 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | VLABench Unseen Texture (test) | IS76 | 5 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | VLABench Average (test) | IS71.2 | 5 | |
| Robot Manipulation | VLABench In Distribution | IS Success Rate85 | 5 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | VLABench Semantic Instruction (test) | IS Score82 | 5 | |
| Robotic Manipulation | VLABench Cross-Category (test) | IS39 | 5 | |
| CollectFruits | Dobot Easy | Success Rate88 | 4 | |
| CollectFruits | Dobot Hard | Distance Score4.3 | 4 |