EVA: Aligning Video World Models with Executable Robot Actions via Inverse Dynamics Rewards

TL;DR

This paper introduces EVA, a reinforcement learning framework that aligns video world models with executable robot actions by using inverse dynamics as a reward, improving the physical plausibility and task success of generated videos.

Contribution

EVA leverages inverse dynamics models as a reward signal to train video world models, reducing artifacts and enhancing real robot task performance.

Findings

EVA reduces embodiment artifacts in generated videos.

EVA improves task success rates on RoboTwin and real robots.

EVA aligns visual models with physical constraints effectively.

Abstract

Video generative models are increasingly used as world models for robotics, where a model generates a future visual rollout conditioned on the current observation and task instruction, and an inverse dynamics model (IDM) converts the generated frames into executable robot actions. However, current video world models lack explicit executability constraints. As a result, visually coherent rollouts may still violate rigid-body and kinematic consistency, producing unstable or infeasible control commands when decoded by an IDM. We refer to this mismatch between visual generation and physically executable control as the executability gap. While this gap can be mitigated at inference time using techniques such as rejection sampling, such approaches are inefficient due to the high cost of video generation. In this paper, we leverage the executability gap as a training signal and introduce Executable Video Alignment (EVA), a reinforcement-learning post-training framework for aligning video world models. EVA trains an inverse dynamics model on real robot trajectories and repurposes it as a reward model that evaluates generated videos through the action sequences they induce, encouraging smooth motions measured by velocity, acceleration, and jerk while penalizing actions that violate embodiment constraints. Importantly, the reward remains informative even when generated videos contain severe visual artifacts, since such artifacts typically translate into unstable or out-of-bound actions. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and a real bimanual robot show that EVA reduces embodiment-specific artifacts in generated rollouts and improves downstream task execution success.