{"ID":5676747,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-03T03:29:23.032456456Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-07T01:06:03.009715918Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02503","arxiv_id":"2607.02503","title":"VT-WAM: Visual-Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation","abstract":"Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to react to local deformation, pressure, slip, and friction, yet these cues are temporally sparse and often invisible in visual observations. Existing visual-tactile policies usually feed tactile observations directly into action prediction, but rarely model tactile deformation dynamics during action generation. In this paper, we introduce VT-WAM, a Visual-Tactile World Action Model that jointly learns future visual prediction, tactile deformation prediction, and action prediction within a unified flow matching framework. In particular, VT-WAM introduces (1) Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) attention to bridge a first-frame visual anchor with temporal tactile dynamics, and (2) contact-gated Action-Visual-Tactile Attention Guidance (AVTAG) to encourage action queries to rely on tactile evidence during contact phases. Across six real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, VT-WAM achieves a 71.67% average success rate, outperforming Fast-WAM by 26.67% and OmniVTLA by 35.84%. Ablations demonstrate that modeling tactile deformation dynamics and guiding contact-phase tactile attention are both important for contact-rich tasks. Project website: https://vt-wam.github.io/.","short_abstract":"Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to react to local deformation, pressure, slip, and friction, yet these cues are temporally sparse and often invisible in visual observations. Existing visual-tactile policies usually feed tactile observations directly into action prediction, but rarely model tactile deformati...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02503","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.02503v1","authors":"[\"Shuai Tian\",\"Yupeng Zheng\",\"Yuhang Zheng\",\"Songen Gu\",\"Yujie Zang\",\"Yuxing Qin\",\"Weize Li\",\"Haoran Li\",\"Wenchao Ding\",\"Dongbin Zhao\"]","published":"2026-07-02T17:58:36Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[\"Transformer\"]","has_code":false}