Jun 15, 2026
Quick glossary for readers new to VLA/WAM terminology
VLA Vision-Language-Action model: a robot policy that starts from a pretrained VLM backbone and adapts it to generate actions from visual observations and language instructions. Large-scale VLM pretraining is a core part of the recipe. See Pi-0 and GR00T N1.
WAM World-Action Model: a policy that starts from a pretrained world-model or video backbone and adapts it to represent or predict how the scene changes over time and emit corresponding actions. We use WAM as the term throughout this post.
VLM Vision-Language Model: a model pretrained on image-text or video-text data to produce language outputs grounded in visual inputs, usually before being adapted for robot control.
