$N_0$-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23783v1
• Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:58:53 GMT
• Title: $N_0$-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
• Abstract summary: We present a tactile-native world-action model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts both future vision and future contact.<n>To our knowledge, it is the first tactile world-action model trained at large scale, and it shows strong capability on contact-rich tasks.<n>We use NeoForce, a unified force-based tactile representation, to form a physically grounded contact signal that conditions action generation.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: We present $N_0$-TWAM, a tactile-native world-action model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts both future vision and future contact. To our knowledge, it is the first tactile world-action model trained at large scale, and it shows strong capability on contact-rich tasks. We pre-train $N_0$-TWAM at large scale with visuo-tactile joint training over tactile-rich demonstrations spanning six embodiments and 450 tasks. We use NeoForce, a unified force-based tactile representation, to form a physically grounded contact signal that conditions action generation. To improve long-horizon and multi-stage manipulation, we introduce tactile contact events for task staging and advance through them during execution. For real-time efficiency, we adopt an asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that pairs a full-width expert for video prediction with slim experts for downstream action and tactile prediction. Evaluations on both real and simulated benchmarks justify the capabilities of $N_0$-TWAM across a range of contact-rich tasks, and demonstrate the benefit of data scaling for precise tactile and action prediction. In summary, $N_0$-TWAM endows a world-action model with predictive capabilities to foresee vision, touch and action, building a solid foundation for fine-grained manipulation on open contact-rich tasks. The codebase and model checkpoints will be made publicly available to foster further research and development in tactile-enabled robotic manipulation.

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