RESEARCH PAPER

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

Li, Ying; Wei, Xiaobao; Cao, Jiajun; Wang, Hao; Chi, Xiaowei; Bai, Chengyu; Sun, Qianpu; Li, Jiajun; Zhang, Xiaojie; Jia, Peidong; Tang, Jian; Han, Sirui; Zhang, Shanghang

Classification

View four quadrants
Major category
WAMs
Architecture
Dual-system
Prediction paradigm
Other mechanisms
Source review status
Verified from primary sources
AT A GLANCE

Contribution

To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

Abstract

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

Affiliations

1Peking University; 2The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; 3Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics