Beyond Task Success: Behavioral and Representational Diagnostics for WAM and VLA
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies and World-Action Models (WAM) represent two increasingly important paradigms for robotic manipulation. However, it remains unclear whether future prediction in WAMs leads to behaviorally meaningful improvements beyond final task success. In this paper, we ask whether WAMs merely add future prediction, or whether they change robot behavior and internal representations in ways that are actionable for control. We introduce a model-agnostic diagnostic framework that compares WAMs and VLAs through two complementary lenses: behavioral rollout analysis and sparse-autoencoder-based feature analysis. The behavioral protocol measures action dynamics consistency...
| Authors | Hung Mai, Bin Zhu, Tuan Do |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 31 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 May 2026 |
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