Predicting What Matters: Robust Generalist Robot Policy Learning via Future Semantic Mask

摘要

World models derived from large-scale video generative pre-training have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robot policy learning. However, standard approaches often focus on high-fidelity RGB video prediction, but this can result in overfitting to irrelevant factors, such as dynamic backgrounds and illumination changes. These distractions reduce the model's ability to generalize, ultimately leading to unreliable and fragile control policies. To address this, we introduce the Mask World Model (MWM), that leverages video diffusion architectures to predict the evolution of semantic masks instead of pixels. This shift imposes a geometric information bottleneck, forcing the model to capture essential physical dynamics and contact relations while filtering out visual noise. We seamlessly integrate this mask dynamics backbone with a diffusion-based policy head to enable robust end-to-end control. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MWM on the LIBERO and RLBench simulation benchmarks, which significantly outperforming the state-of-the-arts RGB-based world models. Furthermore, real-world experiments and robustness evaluation (via random token pruning) reveal that MWM exhibits superior generalization capabilities with robust resilience to texture information loss.