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Robotics

-0: A Latent Predictive World Action Model for Concurrent Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Zhe Li, Zhenzhe Zhang, Yangyang Wei, Wenjie Zhang, Xichen Yuan, Peiyuan Zhi, Gen Li, Xinying Guo, Fengjie Gao, Jianfei Yang, Shanghang Zhang

Featured August 9, 2026

Original Paper

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Simply

This robot brain helps humanoids move and grab things at the same time by predicting what the world will look like next in a simple way, then using that foresight to create smooth, whole-body actions.

In depth
The paper introduces -0, a novel latent predictive world-action model for humanoid robots that tackles concurrent loco-manipulation. It achieves this by directly predicting controller-compatible whole-body action latents. Crucially, instead of reconstructing future videos, the model learns compact future observation embeddings as a lightweight predictive objective, effectively coupling latent visual foresight with diffusion-based whole-body action generation.

Key Takeaways

  • 1
    The model enables humanoids to perform complex household tasks requiring simultaneous movement, balance, and object manipulation, overcoming limitations of decomposed policies for concurrent loco-manipulation.
  • 2
    It employs a latent predictive world model that uses lightweight future observation embeddings as an auxiliary predictive signal, avoiding computationally expensive video generation while still providing crucial task-progress cues.
  • 3
    The approach leverages diffusion-based whole-body action generation to directly denoise controller-compatible action latents, ensuring smooth and coordinated execution on real humanoid robots.

Conceptual Flow

HIGH LEVEL
1
Methodology: How the Robot Thinks and Acts

The robot sees, feels its body, and gets instructions, then predicts future actions and what it will see next to move and grab things smoothly.

Robot Sees
Robot Feels
Human Tells
Think & Predict
Next Robot Moves
Next Robot Sees
2
Results: What the Robot Achieved

This new method helps robots do many household tasks much better than older methods, especially when they need to move and use their hands together.

Old Robot Methods
New Robot Method
Compare Performance
Better Task Success
Smoother Movement