dWorldEval: Scalable Robotic Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model

arXiv cs.RO / 4/27/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces dWorldEval, a scalable method for evaluating robotics policies by using a discrete diffusion world model as an evaluation proxy rather than running policies across every environment/task explicitly.
  • dWorldEval unifies multiple modalities—vision, language, and robotic actions—into a single token space and models them with one transformer-based denoising network.
  • To preserve consistency over space and time, the approach adds a sparse keyframe memory mechanism, while a progress token tracks task-completion status.
  • During inference, the model jointly predicts future observations and the progress token, enabling automatic success determination when progress reaches 1.
  • Experiments show dWorldEval outperforms prior methods (WorldEval, Ctrl-World, Ctrl-World, and WorldGym) across LIBERO, RoboTwin, and several real-robot tasks, suggesting a new scalable world-modeling paradigm for robotics evaluation.

Abstract

Evaluating robotics policies across thousands of environments and thousands of tasks is infeasible with existing approaches. This motivates the need for a new methodology for scalable robotics policy evaluation. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, which uses a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policies. Specifically, dWorldEval maps all modalities - including vision, language, and robotic actions - into a unified token space, modeling them via a single transformer-based denoising network. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, using a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policy. Specifically, it maps all modalities, including vision, language, and robotics action into a unified token space, then denoises them with a single transformer network. Building on this architecture, we employ a sparse keyframe memory to maintain spatiotemporal consistency. We also introduce a progress token that indicates the degree of task completion. At inference, the model jointly predicts future observations and progress token, allowing automatically determine success when the progress reaches 1. Extensive experiments demonstrate that dWorldEval significantly outperforms previous approaches, i.e., WorldEval, Ctrl-World, and WorldGym, on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and multiple real-robot tasks. It paves the way for a new architectural paradigm in building world simulators for robotics evaluation at scale.