ResearchResearch paperRobotics & Embodied AI1 source · Oct 9, 2026

SmolWAM: A Latent World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devices

We present SmolWAM, a latent WAM that we derive from the 2B-parameter Cosmos Policy by keeping its pretrained trunk and rebuilding its inference interface: single-frame visual latents, cached text features that preserve the trunk's attention sinks, 12 of 28 transformer blocks, and 1,008 tokens from which actions and future visual latents are read out in one rectified-flow step.

Key points

  • World-action models (WAMs) predict a robot's actions together with the observations those actions will produce.
  • However, the strongest models rely on video diffusion transformers that are far too computationally expensive for resource-constrained edge devices.
  • Trained in 3.6 GPU-hours, SmolWAM succeeds in 95.5% of 400 LIBERO episodes at 57 ms and 2.3 TFLOP per 16-action chunk with 2.4 GiB of GPU memory, 11x faster than its teacher with 18.5x fewer FLOPs and 3.2x less memory, and its world head still forecasts scene motion.

Sources (1)

  • [1]SmolWAM: A Latent World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devices
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 9, 03:34 PM
    We present SmolWAM, a latent WAM that we derive from the 2B-parameter Cosmos Policy by keeping its pretrained trunk and rebuilding its inference interface: single-frame visual latents, cached text features that preserve the trunk's attention sinks, 12 of 28 transformer blocks, and 1,008 tokens from which actions and future visual latents are read out in one rectified-flow step.
    World-action models (WAMs) predict a robot's actions together with the observations those actions will produce.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

Before this

  1. Oct 9, 2026Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo
  2. Oct 9, 2026Introducing Clef-omni with full multimodality, plus a faster Clef and a cheaper Clef-flash
  3. Oct 9, 2026Learning Representations to Guide Pixel Diffusion Transformers
  4. Oct 8, 2026LEGO: A Lifting-Free Approach for Exocentric-to-Egocentric Video Generation
  5. Oct 8, 2026One Block, Multiple Depths: Recurrent Vision Transformers with Depth-Programmed Experts
  6. Oct 7, 2026nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Super-VL-120B-A12B-NVFP4-LiLiCorr

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