RESEARCH PAPER

QuantWAMs: Calibrating at the Right Granularity for World Action Models

Zhou, Jiacheng; Lv, Jinfan; Li, Ruixuan; Zhang, Longtai; Wang, Yan; Zhang, Wenqiang; Qi, Lizhe

Classification

View four quadrants
Major category
WAMs
Architecture
Not applicable
Prediction paradigm
Other mechanisms
Source review status
Verified from primary sources
AT A GLANCE

Contribution

We present QuantWAMs, a PTQ framework that aligns quantization decisions with the calibration context defined by model structure, rollout distribution, and task objective.

Abstract

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, but their iterative denoising and closed-loop execution make efficient deployment costly. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods are poorly suited to WAMs because they rely on open-loop objectives, homogeneous model assumptions, and calibration distributions that do not reflect deployment. We present QuantWAMs, a PTQ framework that aligns quantization decisions with the calibration context defined by model structure, rollout distribution, and task objective. QuantWAMs introduces three strategies: shared-basis outlier calibration, which pools activation evidence only across coordinate-compatible modules; co-training-objective saliency, which computes empirical-Fisher scores from the joint video--action gradient and assigns weight precision at a calibration-stable layer granularity; and fixed-intervention rollout auditing, which revises denoising-step protection schedules using reachable closed-loop states without changing the precision budget. We evaluate QuantWAMs on Fast-WAM and LingBot-VA across RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO, and real-robot manipulation with an AgiBot G2. Under a W4A4-dominant setting, the reported simulation means differ from FP16 by 0.2--0.7 percentage points. Real-robot trials further establish deployment feasibility on three manipulation tasks. For the targeted video and action blocks, QuantWAMs reduces peak weight-and-activation memory to about 29\% of FP16 and provides 1.4--1.6×\times block-level speedups.

Affiliations

College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University; Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing; College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University; School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University