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Imitation from Heterogeneous Demonstrations using Grounded Latent-Action World Models

arXiv 2026 53.7 method

TLDR

A grounded latent-action world model aligns heterogeneous demonstration data for imitation learning, outperforming baselines in simulation and real-world tasks.

Reasoning

The paper introduces a novel method (GLAM) that uses a shared latent action space grounded in prediction to handle heterogeneous data sources, which is a clear strength. Weaknesses include reliance on abstract descriptions without detailed experimental results in the abstract, and potential limitations in scalability or complexity not discussed.

Read-first score

Read-first score 53.7, weighted from topical fit, citation, graph, method, reproducibility, and recency signals. Original total remains 35.

Recency 6%
100

Uses a gentle age decay so recent papers surface without erasing older foundations. 2026

Citation impact 18%
91.8

Uses OpenAlex-shaped citation metadata as a bibliometric attention signal, separate from paper quality. citation_normalized_percentile=0.91798345

Topical relevance 29%
50

Uses existing LLM keyword relevance scores normalized to 0-100. world model,world simulator,generative world model,interactive world model,video world model,world dynamics prediction,model-based reinforcement learning world model

Methodology quality 18%
50

Screens visible abstract and analysis fields for experiment, dataset, baseline, metric, and limitation evidence. markers=baseline

Reproducibility 18%
46

Screens links and visible text for paper, code, dataset, artifact, and repository signals. pdf=True; code=False; dataset=False; markers=code,github

Citation velocity 12%
0

Citation velocity estimates citations per publication-year to reduce old-paper bias. velocity=0.00

Field roles

FoundationFrontierBridge

Rank sensitivity

Stability: volatile; rank range: 385.

Keyword Scores

world model
10
generative world model
8
world dynamics prediction
7
model-based reinforcement learning world model
4
world simulator
3
interactive world model
2
video world model
1

Deep Analysis

Innovations

  • Grounding action representations in prediction: actions that produce the same effect on the environment share the same representation, regardless of source.
  • Grounded latent-action world model (GLAM): a pair of generative models with a shared latent action space across heterogeneous data sources, grounded by predicting future observations consistently.
  • Co-training approach that avoids heuristic and hand-engineered alignment techniques for heterogeneous demonstration data.

Methodology

GLAM uses a pair of generative models (world models) to learn a shared latent action space across heterogeneous data sources (with and without action labels). The latent actions are grounded by predicting future observations consistently across sources. Downstream behavioral cloning (BC) policies are trained to map observations to latent actions, which are then decoded back to robot actions.

Key Results

Across five manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world, GLAM-aligned policies achieve an average of +48% improvement in task success rate over BC baselines and prior latent-action methods in a data-scarce setting.

Tags

imitation learningheterogeneous demonstrationsworld modelslatent actionvisuomotor policiesrepresentation learningROAI