WEAVER, Better, Faster, Longer: An Effective World Model for Robotic Manipulation

Arnav Kumar Jain, Yilin Wu, Jesse Farebrother, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy — The potential impacts of world models (WMs, i.e., learned simulators) on robotics are far-reaching -- policy evaluation, policy improvement, and test-time planning -- all with limited real-world interaction. To unlock these downstream capabilities, a WM needs to jointly satisfy three desiderata: (i) fidelity (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that correlate with reality), (ii) consistency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that are coherent over long horizons), and (iii) efficiency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories quickly). We propose WEAVER (World Estimation Across Views for Embodied Reasoning): a WM architecture that simultaneously achieves all three desiderata, providing state-of-the-art results on robotic manipulation tasks. WEAVER is a multi-view WM trained to predict future latents and reward values via a flow-matching loss. We distill the key design decisions across model architecture, memory, and prediction objectives required to unlock the kinds of long-horizon dynamic manipulation tasks that have confounded prior world modeling approaches. We apply WEAVER in robotic hardware, demonstrating its effectiveness at policy evaluation (ρ=0.870 correlation with real-world success rate), policy improvement (real-world success rate improvement of 38% on top of the π_{0.5} robot foundation model), and test-time planning (real-world success rate improvement of 14% with a 5-10times speed