Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for
  Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets
Authors: name: Chuning Zhu; name: Raymond Yu; name: Siyuan Feng; name: Benjamin Burchfiel; name: Paarth Shah; name: Abhishek Gupta
Published: 2025-04-03 17:38:59

Abstract: Imitation learning has emerged as a promising approach towards building
generalist robots. However, scaling imitation learning for large robot
foundation models remains challenging due to its reliance on high-quality
expert demonstrations. Meanwhile, large amounts of video data depicting a wide
range of environments and diverse behaviors are readily available. This data
provides a rich source of information about real-world dynamics and
agent-environment interactions. Leveraging this data directly for imitation
learning, however, has proven difficult due to the lack of action annotation
required for most contemporary methods. In this work, we present Unified World
Models (UWM), a framework that allows for leveraging both video and action data
for policy learning. Specifically, a UWM integrates an action diffusion process
and a video diffusion process within a unified transformer architecture, where
independent diffusion timesteps govern each modality. We show that by simply
controlling each diffusion timestep, UWM can flexibly represent a policy, a
forward dynamics, an inverse dynamics, and a video generator. Through simulated
and real-world experiments, we show that: (1) UWM enables effective pretraining
on large-scale multitask robot datasets with both dynamics and action
predictions, resulting in more generalizable and robust policies than imitation
learning, (2) UWM naturally facilitates learning from action-free video data
through independent control of modality-specific diffusion timesteps, further
improving the performance of finetuned policies. Our results suggest that UWM
offers a promising step toward harnessing large, heterogeneous datasets for
scalable robot learning, and provides a simple unification between the often
disparate paradigms of imitation learning and world modeling. Videos and code
are available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/uwm/.