Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models

arXiv:2608.11605v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) connect visual prediction with robot control, but supplying predictive context often requires expensive future-video generation. Direct policies avoid this cost but lack an explicit interface for accessing future-indexed predictive information. We introduce ForeWAM, a World Action Model that separates forecasting from rendering to expose and shape latent predictive context for efficient control. Its core mechanism, Future-KV, performs a single Video DiT prefill over the current visual latent and noise-initialized future slots, then reuses the resulting key-value states throughout action denoising. To make this context relevant to control, we introduce dynamics registers supervised by latent actions from a frozen teacher during training, encouraging representations of interaction-induced transitions. This reusable context supports a lightweight, single-layer action decoder. We evaluate ForeWAM on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboCasa, and real-world manipulation tasks. Without additional policy-level embodied pretraining, ForeWAM improves RoboCasa success by 9.7 percentage points over Fast-WAM at the same budget of 50 demonstrations per task, reaching 59.2%. With a single-layer decoder, it achieves 77.6% success on LIBERO-Plus and reduces policy-query latency to 88.7 ms on an NVIDIA A800, delivering a 6.27-fold speedup over Fast-WAM. These results show that latent predictive computation provides useful foresight for robust, efficient control without explicit future-video generation.