Paper Detail

Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization

Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu

arxiv Score 8.3

Published 2026-08-26 · First seen 2026-08-27

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task can be performed simply by specifying it in the context, without any parameter update. This form of in-context learning (ICL) turns generalization into a problem of task specification. To achieve cross-task generalization, we bring this paradigm to robotic manipulation, and argue that the natural task specification for manipulation is a human video: unlike language, it provides rich visual cues about the intended task evolution. We present Zero-WAM, a causal video-action model that executes unseen tasks by following in-context human video guidance. To address the scarcity of task-rich paired human-robot data, we propose an automatic pipeline that converts task-sampled robot trajectories into semantically matched human videos, yielding HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks. For model training, we further introduce an in-context future chunk prediction (IFP) objective that suppresses shortcuts learned from seen tasks and forces the policy to draw task information from the video prompt. On seven unseen tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 simulation, Zero-WAM achieves a 47.0% average success rate, an absolute improvement of 29.5 percentage points over the strongest video-action baseline. In real-world evaluations, it follows human video guidance to generalize to unseen task configurations involving multi-object scenes, long-horizon manipulation, and fine-grained insertion.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{zhou2026zero,
  title = {Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization},
  author = {Jiaming Zhou and Qihang Zhang and Gangwei Xu and Cunxin Fan and Yujie Zhao and Ruilin Wang and Yiming Luo and Shuai Yang and Xing Zhu and Yujun Shen and Junwei Liang and Yinghao Xu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task can be performed simply by specifying it in the context, without any parameter update. This form of in-context learning (ICL) turns generalization into a problem of task specification. To achieve cross-task generalization, we bring this paradigm to robotic manipulation, and argue that the natural task},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26103},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.CV, zero-shot cross-task generalization, in-context learning, causal video-action model, HumanGen, in-context future chunk prediction, video-action baseline, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2608.26103},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}