Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
Original source2 min read

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

Summary

World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions. FlowMo-WM infers object-centric motion and long-history context associated with hidden drift without direct flow supervision. It factorizes history into short-history latent and longer-history context, using zero-context residual transition to improve long-horizon prediction in simulated aquatic environments.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Yitao Jiang, Luyang Zhao, Muhao Chen, Devin Balkcom
FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions
Read article

[2606.13817] FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

[Submitted on 11 Jun 2026]

Title:FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

View a PDF of the paper titled FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift, by Yitao Jiang and 3 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2606.13817 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.13817v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13817

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yitao Jiang [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:46:43 UTC (2,449 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift, by Yitao Jiang and 3 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.RO

new | recent | 2026-06

Change to browse by:

cs cs.LG

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersAdvanced

Key points

  • FlowMo-WM decouples object momentum from hidden ambient drift by decomposing image-action history into motion state and drift context.
  • A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects, enhancing long-term prediction.
  • Experiments in simulated aquatic environments show superior performance over other latent world models, with context ablation confirming its importance.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.