Title: Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: World Model, Vision-Language-Action Model (VLA)

Abstract: Generalist robot policies can now perform a wide range of manipulation skills, but evaluating and improving their ability with unfamiliar objects and instructions remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation requires a large number of real-world rollouts, while systematic improvement demands additional corrective data with expert labels. Both of these processes are slow, costly, and difficult to scale.
World models offer a promising, scalable alternative by enabling policies to rollout within imagination space. 
However, a key challenge is building a controllable world model that can handle multi-step interactions with generalist robot policies. 
This requires a world model compatible with modern generalist policies by supporting multi-view prediction, fine-grained action control, and consistent long-horizon interactions, which is not achieved by previous works.
In this paper, we make a step forward by introducing a controllable multi-view world model that can be used to evaluate and improve the instruction-following ability of generalist robot policies. Our model maintains long-horizon consistency with a pose-conditioned memory retrieval mechanism and achieves precise action control through frame-level action conditioning. Trained on the DROID dataset (95k trajectories, 564 scenes), our model generates spatially and temporally consistent trajectories under novel scenarios and new camera placements for over 20 seconds. We show that our method can accurately rank policy performance without real-world robot rollouts. Moreover, by synthesizing successful trajectories in imagination and using them for supervised fine-tuning, our approach can improve policy success by 44.7\%. Videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/ctrl-world.

TL;DR: We propose a controllable world model for robot manipulation, which can be used for policy evaluation and policy improvement.