World models are increasingly used in embodied intelligence and generative simulation, yet their scope remains ambiguous across communities. This tutorial presents a design-space view of world models as action-conditioned predictive models that estimate the future evolution of task-relevant observations or states. We categorize existing methods into observation-space and state-space world models, comparing their trade-offs in visual fidelity, spatial structure, physical interpretability, and control usability. We further introduce world action models, which connect predicted futures with executable robot actions, and summarize four representative paradigms: imagine-then-execute, video-feature-conditioned action prediction, joint video-action modeling, and auxiliary video prediction for policy learning. The goal of this tutorial is to clarify the conceptual scope of world (action) models and provide a structured taxonomy for embodied prediction and control.
World Action Models (WAMs) enable semantically- and physically-informed control but are brittle under distribution shift. In this work, we use mechanistic interpretability to study how robustness-relevant perturbations are represented in WAM activation space. Comparing activation…
Accompanying a group of humans is an essential aspect of developing human-like social cognition in robots. However, human groups typically do not follow fixed formations, which poses significant challenges for robots in maintaining natural companionship behaviors. In this paper,…
Communication-limited robots in mission-critical scenarios such as disaster inspection and search-and-rescue must make reliable onboard decisions without access to remote operators or high-capacity reasoning services. Episodic memory reuse is an attractive low-cost fallback, but…
Perception-based humanoid loco-manipulation requires connecting egocentric observations and task instructions to whole-body motion. Learning this mapping requires synchronized egocentric images, language commands, and robot-compatible kinematic trajectories, yet no existing data…
Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat mapping and planning as separate stages and often rely on binary…
The deployment of high-speed Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 3D aerial highways necessitates robust coordination of physical flight kinematics and multi-tier network handovers. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers rapid tactical control, it lacks the zero-shot strate…