SWAM: Scaling World Action Models
with Cross-Modal Alignment

Yu Zhou1,2,3,*,‡Xinyuan Xia1,2,3,*Xuankun Yang1,3,*Yinghao Yang4,2,3,*Wendi Chen1,2,3
Bowen Liu1,2,3,‡Jianhan Ma3Weicheng Duan5,3Jun Lv3Cewu Lu1,2,3Yanwei Li1,†
*Equal contribution.†Corresponding author.‡Work completed during internships at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Video introduction01:50 · Audio available

Preserve Language-Video priors and Align them with action.
Generalize beyond clean scenes.

Abstract

World action models jointly predict video and actions conditioned on language. Existing studies focus primarily on architectures and training mechanisms, typically treating language–video alignment acquired through video pretraining as an established foundation. However, introducing action learning may impair this alignment. Principled guidance on data and supervision design for maintaining language–video alignment during action learning remains limited. To investigate this, we curate a pool of approximately 47,000 hours of general videos, egocentric videos, UMI demonstrations, and robot demonstrations. Building on this, we systematically study how language–video supervision, language–video–action supervision, and the joint use of these two forms affect WAM performance. In particular, we examine how language annotation quality affects pretrained language–video capabilities, and how action supervision from UMI and robot demonstrations extends these capabilities to language–video–action modeling. To better scale the model, we further conduct detailed studies on joint training recipe and model architecture. Under a fixed training budget, mixing egocentric videos and UMI demonstrations improves control generalization. Model architecture affects how effectively these experiences are used, while scaling pretraining under the selected configuration brings further gains. The resulting recipe, post-trained on RoboTwin Clean demonstrations only, achieves success rates of 88.10% and 61.56% under Easy (Clean-to-Clean) and Hard (Clean-to-Random) conditions, respectively. Our model achieves 40.00% SR across three real-world tasks, compared with 23.33% for the strongest baseline, indicating better generalization under unseen conditions. We release the curated data, training code, and model weights.

01 / Multisource experience

Data

Pretraining uses four types of experience: General videos, Egocentric videos, UMI demonstrations, and Robot demonstrations.
Four complementary data sources form a curated pool of 47K hours.

Interactive dataset composition

Language–video supervision

State and action signals

≈47K hmultisource experience

4.41M episodes Four complementary sources connect broad visual experience with embodied action.

General videos

23.2%

10,909.6 hours

Panda-70M · OpenVid

Diverse scenes, objects, and visual dynamics broaden language–video experience beyond manipulation demonstrations.

Egocentric videos

23.4%

10,986.3 hours

EgoSuite · Ego4D · EgoVerse

First-person daily activities and manipulation across real-world environments broaden visual and semantic coverage.

UMI demonstrations

32.5%

15,284.9 hours

In-house UMI · Collected with RoboPocket

Human gripper demonstrations connect video to action, covering long-horizon manipulation, deformable objects, and bimanual coordination.

Robot demonstrations

20.9%

9,836.0 hours

ABC · AgiBot · InternData-A1 · Galaxea · RoboCOIN · RoboMind

Bimanual robot trajectories with scene and dual-wrist views provide embodiment-specific state and action grounding where valid.

02 / Cross-modal alignment

Architecture

A video stream and a dedicated action stream share masked attention.
Language enters through video features, preserving the pretrained alignment.

03 / Controlled studies

Findings

04 / Evaluation

Experiments

In RoboTwin, post-train on Clean demonstrations and test in clean and randomized scenes.
We study transfer across 50 RoboTwin tasks and three real-world tasks.

Easy

SWAM (Ours) · SR: 88.10%

SWAM (Ours)StarVLAπ0.5Xiaomi Robotics-0X-VLAFast-WAMLingBot-VAOpenWAMX-WAM4D-WAM

Hard

SWAM (Ours) · SR: 61.56%

SWAM (Ours)StarVLAπ0.5Xiaomi Robotics-0X-VLAFast-WAMLingBot-VAOpenWAMX-WAM4D-WAM

Average

SWAM (Ours) · SR: 74.83%

SWAM (Ours)StarVLAπ0.5Xiaomi Robotics-0X-VLAFast-WAMLingBot-VAOpenWAMX-WAM4D-WAM

SWAM: 75k Ego/UMI + 25k robot pretraining, followed by Clean-only post-training.
+12.86 percentage points over OpenWAM under Hard conditions.

Real-world comparison

Hard · SR

SWAM (Ours) · SR: 40.00%

025507510040.00SWAM (Ours)4.44StarVLA20.00π0.56.67Fast-WAM10.00LingBot-VA23.33OpenWAM

Hard · PSR

SWAM (Ours) · PSR: 50.36%

025507510050.36SWAM (Ours)21.55StarVLA37.78π0.514.52Fast-WAM24.01LingBot-VA31.67OpenWAM
SR · All subtasks completedPSR · Fraction of predefined subtasks completed
05 / Real-robot generalization

From clean scenes to new conditions

SWAM generalizes learned manipulation skills to new objects and scene conditions.
We demonstrate this across cup stacking, towel folding, and pick-and-place.

Seen sceneREFERENCE
Single-color cups on a plain gray tabletop.
Unseen sceneSUCCESS

Multi-colored cups · Patterned tablecloth

Seen sceneREFERENCE
A plain, light-colored towel on a gray tabletop.
Unseen sceneSUCCESS

Striped towel · Illustrated tablecloth

Pick and place

Seen sceneREFERENCE
Plain tabletop · Object placed in a box
Unseen sceneSUCCESS

New objects + visual distractors · Cherries + Orange → Blocks into box

More real-world rollouts

EasyFamiliar objects and scene; initial positions vary.
HardNew objects, changed backgrounds, or both.
Cup stackingEasy
Single-color cups · Plain tabletop
Towel foldingEasy
Blue towel · Plain tabletop
Pick and placeEasy
Familiar object + container
Cup stackingHard
Multi-colored cups · Plain tabletop
Towel foldingHard
New towel · Checkered tabletop
Pick and placeHard
New object · Plain tabletop
Cup stackingHard
Multi-colored cups · Plain tabletop
Towel foldingHard
New towel · Checkered tabletop
Pick and placeHard
New object · Plain tabletop
Cup stackingHard
Multi-colored cups · Patterned tabletop
Towel foldingHard
New towel · Checkered tabletop
Pick and placeHard
New object · Plain tabletop

Recorded executions, not model-predicted video. Easy and Hard denote the evaluation conditions; captions describe the visible scene.

Research figure