RIWANav: Recursive World-Action Models with Self-Improvement for Urban Navigation

Abstract

Long-horizon urban navigation requires sequential local decisions whose errors can compound over time. Imitation learning (IL) rarely learns from failures, while physical trial-and-error reinforcement learning (RL) is costly. Action-conditioned world models can provide imagined feedback by predicting visual consequences for candidate actions. However, a frozen world model may become less reliable as the policy evolves. In this paper, we introduce RIWANAV, a post-training framework that casts the coupled adaptation of a world model and an action model (policy) as task-specific recursive self-improvement (RSI). Each cycle alternates two updates. The world model evaluates policy actions through imagined outcomes, providing comparative feedback for group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). The improved policy then constructs a grounded self-curriculum, selecting expert-consistent action-video pairs by behavioral novelty and prediction error. The refined world model supplies feedback for the next policy update, closing the recursive self-improvement loop. Experiments show that RIWANAV outperforms training baselines and prior methods, validating the proposed recursive self-improvement loop between the policy and world model. Real-world trials further demonstrate its practical applicability.