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arXiv · 2608.23927

GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models

Linhan Wang·Zijian An·Mingyuan Zhang·Chen Dai·Yi Xu·Can Cui·Zichong Yang·Yinlin Chen·Lifeng Zhou·Chang-Tien Lu
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Abstract

Video generative models provide rich physical priors for robot learning, yet existing world-action models (WAMs) face a fundamental trade-off: synchronous video generation at control rate is latency-prohibitive, while abandoning test-time visual imagination sacrifices task success. We show that visual imagination achieves both real-time inference and superior success rates when generated asynchronously off the critical path and consumed directly in latent space. We introduce GlanceWAM, which decouples imagination from control within a single video DiT: an asynchronous proposer glances ahead on a slow clock to imagine a single lookahead frame seconds into the future in the background, while an action head decodes action chunks at control rate (48 ms) purely in latent space without blocking. Enabled by a non-interfering attention mask that isolates video representations and staleness-robust horizon training that accommodates asynchronous lookahead aging, GlanceWAM breaks the speed-success dilemma. Trained purely on demonstrations, it attains 72.2% on the 24-task RoboCasa kitchen benchmark (surpassing synchronous Cosmos Policy at 67.1% and imagination-free co-training at 64.4%) and 99.0% on LIBERO, executing at 48 ms per chunk on an NVIDIA A100 GPU (24x faster than synchronous baselines). Code is available at https://github.com/linhanwang/GlanceWAM.

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Linhan Wang, Zijian An, Mingyuan Zhang, Chen Dai, Yi Xu, Can Cui, Zichong Yang, Yinlin Chen, Lifeng Zhou, Chang-Tien Lu. 2026-08-25. GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23927

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