WALA Learning Executable Latent Actions from Action-Labeled Demonstrations and Action-Free Videos

2026-07-13Robotics

Robotics
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Authors
Jiahao Liu, Zhongpu Xia, Shuai Tian, Huangrui Li, Yuhang Zheng, Ning Ma, Xin Fu, Xiaotian Liu, Jing Li, Yixian Li, ShangQing Zhou, Zebin Xing, Linbo Wang, Chaoyue Li, Haoran Li, Dongbin Zhao
Abstract
Generalizable robot policies typically rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations, which are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, large-scale human and robot videos contain rich physical interactions but often lack executable robot action labels. We present WALA, a framework for learning executable latent actions from both action-labeled demonstrations and action-free videos. WALA first pretrains a semantic-geometric latent action model from videos by modeling the evolution between current observations and sparsely sampled future observations. Instead of reconstructing raw pixels, WALA predicts future deltas in the DINOv3 feature space and dense depth space, preserving task-relevant semantic and geometric structure while reducing sensitivity to appearance details. During policy training, the pretrained encoder provides stable latent action targets, and the decoder serves as a trainable latent world model. The latent actions generated by the vision-language backbone are jointly supervised by robot action prediction, latent action target matching, and future dynamics prediction. This enables action-labeled demonstrations to provide executable control supervision, while action-free videos contribute dynamics supervision without requiring robot action annotations. Experiments show that WALA achieves strong performance on RoboTwin, sets a new state-of-the-art result on RoboCasa with 75.2% average success, and improves both policy performance and generalization in real-world manipulation tasks.