Contrastive Representation Regularization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong capabilities in robot manipulation by leveraging rich representations from pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, their representations arguably remain suboptimal, lacking sensitivity to robotic signals such as control actions and proprioceptive information. To address the issue, we introduce Robot State-aware Contrastive Loss (RS-CL), a simple and effective representation regularization for VLA models, designed to bridge the gap between VLM representations and robotic signals. In particular, RS-CL aligns the representations more closely with the robot's proprioceptive states by using relative distances between the states as soft supervision. Complementing the original action prediction objective, RS-CL enhances control-relevant representation learning, while being lightweight and fully compatible with standard VLA training pipelines. Our empirical results demonstrate that RS-CL substantially improves the performance of state-of-the-art VLA models; it pushes the prior art to 69.7% achieving the state-of-the-art performance on the RoboCasa-Kitchen benchmark, and boosts success rates from 45.0% to 58.3% on challenging real-robot manipulation tasks.

Taeyoung Kim
Jimin Lee
Myungkyu Koo
Dongyoung Kim
Kyungmin Lee
Changyeon Kim
Younggyo Seo
Jinwoo Shin


Hybrid Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Using Large Language Models to produce intermediate thoughts, a.k.a. Chain-of-thought (CoT), before providing an answer has been a successful recipe for solving complex language tasks. In robotics, similar embodied CoT strategies, generating thoughts before actions, have also been shown to lead to improved performance when using Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs). As these techniques increase the length of the model's generated outputs to include the thoughts, the inference time is negatively affected. Delaying an agent's actions in real-world executions, as in robotic manipulation settings, strongly affects the usability of a method, as tasks require long sequences of actions. However, is the generation of long chains-of-thought a strong prerequisite for achieving performance improvements? In this work, we explore the idea of Hybrid Training (HyT), a framework that enables VLAs to learn from thoughts and benefit from the associated performance gains, while enabling the possibility to leave out CoT generation during inference. Furthermore, by learning to conditionally predict a diverse set of outputs, HyT supports flexibility at inference time, enabling the model to either predict actions directly, generate thoughts or follow instructions. We evaluate the proposed method in a series of simulated benchmarks and real-world experiments.

Pietro Mazzaglia
Cansu Sancaktar
Markus Peschl
Daniel Dijkman


VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues yet typically demands costly real-world interactions or suffers from sim-to-real gaps. We introduce VLA-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that leverages a data-driven world model as a controllable simulator. Trained from real interaction data, the simulator predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions, allowing policy rollouts with dense, trajectory-level rewards derived from goal-achieving references. This design delivers an efficient and action-aligned learning signal, drastically lowering sample requirements. With fewer than 400 fine-tuning steps, VLA-RFT surpasses strong supervised baselines and achieves greater efficiency than simulator-based RL. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness under perturbed conditions, sustaining stable task execution. Our results establish world-model-based RFT as a practical post-training paradigm to enhance the generalization and robustness of VLA models. For more details, please refer to https://vla-rft.github.io/.

Hengtao Li
Pengxiang Ding
Runze Suo
Yihao Wang
Zirui Ge
Dongyuan Zang
Kexian Yu
Mingyang Sun
Hongyin Zhang
Donglin Wang
Weihua Su


MLA: A Multisensory Language-Action Model for Multimodal Understanding and Forecasting in Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations.

Zhuoyang Liu
Jiaming Liu
Jiadong Xu
Nuowei Han
Chenyang Gu
Hao Chen
Kaichen Zhou
Renrui Zhang
Kai Chin Hsieh
Kun Wu
Zhengping Che
Jian Tang
Shanghang Zhang


dVLA: Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model with Multimodal Chain-of-Thought

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a next-generation paradigm for robotics. We introduce dVLA, a diffusion-based VLA that leverages a multimodal chain-of-thought to unify visual perception, language reasoning, and robotic control in a single system. dVLA jointly optimizes perception, language understanding, and action under a single diffusion objective, enabling stronger cross-modal reasoning and better generalization to novel instructions and objects. For practical deployment, we mitigate inference latency by incorporating two acceleration strategies, a prefix attention mask and KV caching, yielding up to around times speedup at test-time inference. We evaluate dVLA in both simulation and the real world: on the LIBERO benchmark, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 96.4% average success rate, consistently surpassing both discrete and continuous action policies; on a real Franka robot, it succeeds across a diverse task suite, including a challenging bin-picking task that requires multi-step planning, demonstrating robust real-world performance. Together, these results underscore the promise of unified diffusion frameworks for practical, high-performance VLA robotics.

Junjie Wen
Minjie Zhu
Jiaming Liu
Zhiyuan Liu
Yicun Yang
Linfeng Zhang
Shanghang Zhang
Yichen Zhu
Yi Xu


Point-It-Out: Benchmarking Embodied Reasoning for Vision Language Models in Multi-Stage Visual Grounding

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive world knowledge across a wide range of tasks, making them promising candidates for embodied reasoning applications. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate the embodied reasoning ability of VLMs through multiple-choice questions based on image annotations -- for example, selecting which trajectory better describes an event in the image. In this work, we introduce the Point-It-Out (PIO) benchmark, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess the embodied reasoning abilities of VLMs through precise visual grounding. We propose a hierarchical evaluation protocol spanning three stages (S1: referred-object localization, S2: task-driven pointing, and S3: visual trace prediction), with data collected from critical domains for embodied intelligence, including indoor, kitchen, driving, and robotic manipulation scenarios. Extensive experiments with over ten state-of-the-art VLMs reveal several interesting findings. For example, strong general-purpose models such as GPT-4o, while excelling on many benchmarks (e.g., language, perception, and reasoning), underperform compared to some open-source models in precise visual grounding; models such as MoLMO perform well in S1 and S2 but struggle in S3, where requires grounding combined with visual trace planning.

Haotian Xue
Yunhao Ge
Yu Zeng
Zhaoshuo Li
Ming-Yu Liu
Yongxin Chen
Jiaojiao Fan


IA-VLA: Input Augmentation for Vision-Language-Action models in settings with semantically complex tasks

Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have become an increasingly popular approach for addressing robot manipulation problems in recent years. However, such models need to output actions at a rate suitable for robot control, which limits the size of the language model they can be based on, and consequently, their language understanding capabilities. Manipulation tasks may require complex language instructions, such as identifying target objects by their relative positions, to specify human intention. Therefore, we introduce IA-VLA, a framework that utilizes the extensive language understanding of a large vision language model as a pre-processing stage to generate improved context to augment the input of a VLA. We evaluate the framework on a set of semantically complex tasks which have been underexplored in VLA literature, namely tasks involving visual duplicates, i.e., visually indistinguishable objects. A dataset of three types of scenes with duplicate objects is used to compare a baseline VLA against two augmented variants. The experiments show that the VLA benefits from the augmentation scheme, especially when faced with language instructions that require the VLA to extrapolate from concepts it has seen in the demonstrations. For the code, dataset, and videos, see https://sites.google.com/view/ia-vla.

Eric Hannus
Miika Malin
Tran Nguyen Le
Ville Kyrki


Focusing on What Matters: Object-Agent-centric Tokenization for Vision Language Action models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a pivotal approach to learning robotic manipulation at scale by repurposing large pre-trained Vision-Language-Models (VLM) to output robotic actions. However, adapting VLMs for robotic domains comes with an unnecessarily high computational cost, which we attribute to the tokenization scheme of visual inputs. In this work, we aim to enable efficient VLA training by proposing Oat-VLA, an Object-Agent-centric Tokenization for VLAs. Building on the insights of object-centric representation learning, our method introduces an inductive bias towards scene objects and the agent's own visual information. As a result, we find that Oat-VLA can drastically reduce the number of visual tokens to just a few tokens without sacrificing performance. We reveal that Oat-VLA converges at least twice as fast as OpenVLA on the LIBERO suite, as well as outperform OpenVLA in diverse real-world pick and place tasks.

Rokas Bendikas
Daniel Dijkman
Markus Peschl
Sanjay Haresh
Pietro Mazzaglia


LAGEA: Language Guided Embodied Agents for Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: Robotic manipulation benefits from foundation models that describe goals, but today's agents still lack a principled way to learn from their own mistakes. We ask whether natural language can serve as feedback, an error-reasoning signal that helps embodied agents diagnose what went wrong and correct course. We introduce LAGEA (Language Guided Embodied Agents), a framework that turns episodic, schema-constrained reflections from a vision language model (VLM) into temporally grounded guidance for reinforcement learning. LAGEA summarizes each attempt in concise language, localizes the decisive moments in the trajectory, aligns feedback with visual state in a shared representation, and converts goal progress and feedback agreement into bounded, step-wise shaping rewards whose influence is modulated by an adaptive, failure-aware coefficient. This design yields dense signals early when exploration needs direction and gracefully recedes as competence grows. On the Meta-World MT10 and Robotic Fetch embodied manipulation benchmark, LAGEA improves average success over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 9.0% on random goals, 5.3% on fixed goals, and 17% on fetch tasks, while converging faster. These results support our hypothesis: language, when structured and grounded in time, is an effective mechanism for teaching robots to self-reflect on mistakes and make better choices.

Abdul Monaf Chowdhury
Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder
Rabeya Akter
Safaeid Hossain Arib


VLA-Reasoner: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Models with Reasoning via Online Monte Carlo Tree Search

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) achieve strong performance in general robotic manipulation tasks by scaling imitation learning. However, existing VLAs are limited to predicting short-sighted next-action, which struggle with long-horizon trajectory tasks due to incremental deviations. To address this problem, we propose a plug-in framework named \method that effectively empowers off-the-shelf VLAs with the capability of foreseeing future states via test-time scaling. Specifically, \method samples and rolls out possible action trajectories where involved actions are rationales to generate future states via a world model, which enables \method to foresee and reason potential outcomes and search for the optimal actions. We further leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to improve search efficiency in large action spaces, where step-wise VLA predictions seed the root. Meanwhile, we introduce a confidence sampling mechanism based on Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), to enable efficient exploration in MCTS without redundant VLA queries. We evaluate intermediate states in MCTS via an offline value estimation strategy, to score predicted futures and correct deviations with long-term feedback. We conducted extensive experiments in both simulators and the real world, demonstrating that our proposed VLA-Reasoner achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art VLAs. Our method highlights a potential pathway toward scalable test-time computation of robotic manipulation. The project website is available at: https://vla-reasoner.github.io/.

Wenkai Guo
Guanxing Lu
Haoyuan Deng
Zhenyu Wu
Yansong Tang
Ziwei Wang


Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

Abstract: Robotic manipulation with Vision-Language-Action models requires efficient inference over long-horizon multi-modal context, where attention to dense visual tokens dominates computational cost. Existing methods optimize inference speed by reducing visual redundancy within VLA models, but they overlook the varying redundancy across robotic manipulation stages. We observe that the visual token redundancy is higher in coarse manipulation phase than in fine-grained operations, and is strongly correlated with the action dynamic. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{A}ction-aware \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{ADP}), a multi-modal pruning framework that integrates text-driven token selection with action-aware trajectory gating. Our method introduces a gating mechanism that conditions the pruning signal on recent action trajectories, using past motion windows to adaptively adjust token retention ratios in accordance with dynamics, thereby balancing computational efficiency and perceptual precision across different manipulation stages. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO suites and diverse real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces FLOPs and action inference latency (\textit{e.g.} $1.35 \times$ speed up on OpenVLA-OFT) while maintaining competitive success rates (\textit{e.g.} 25.8\% improvements with OpenVLA) compared to baselines, thereby providing a simple plug-in path to efficient robot policies that advances the efficiency and performance frontier of robotic manipulation. Our project website is: \href{https://vla-adp.github.io/}{ADP.com}.

Xiaohuan Pei
Yuxing Chen
Siyu Xu
Yunke Wang
Yuheng Shi
Chang Xu


MimicDreamer: Aligning Human and Robot Demonstrations for Scalable VLA Training

Abstract: Vision Language Action (VLA) models derive their generalization capability from diverse training data, yet collecting embodied robot interaction data remains prohibitively expensive. In contrast, human demonstration videos are far more scalable and cost-efficient to collect, and recent studies confirm their effectiveness in training VLA models. However, a significant domain gap persists between human videos and robot-executed videos, including unstable camera viewpoints, visual discrepancies between human hands and robotic arms, and differences in motion dynamics. To bridge this gap, we propose MimicDreamer, a framework that turns fast, low-cost human demonstrations into robot-usable supervision by jointly aligning vision, viewpoint, and actions to directly support policy training. For visual alignment, we propose H2R Aligner, a video diffusion model that generates high-fidelity robot demonstration videos by transferring motion from human manipulation footage. For viewpoint stabilization, EgoStabilizer is proposed, which canonicalizes egocentric videos via homography and inpaints occlusions and distortions caused by warping. For action alignment, we map human hand trajectories to the robot frame and apply a constrained inverse kinematics solver to produce feasible, low-jitter joint commands with accurate pose tracking. Empirically, VLA models trained purely on our synthesized human-to-robot videos achieve few-shot execution on real robots. Moreover, scaling training with human data significantly boosts performance compared to models trained solely on real robot data; our approach improves the average success rate by 14.7\% across six representative manipulation tasks.

Haoyun Li
Ivan Zhang
Runqi Ouyang
Xiaofeng Wang
Zheng Zhu
Zhiqin Yang
Zhentao Zhang
Boyuan Wang
Chaojun Ni
Wenkang Qin
Xinze Chen
Yun Ye
Guan Huang
Zhenbo Song
Xingang Wang


Leveraging Large Language Models for Robot-Assisted Learning of Morphological Structures in Preschool Children with Language Vulnerabilities

Abstract: Preschool children with language vulnerabilities -- such as developmental language disorders or immigration related language challenges -- often require support to strengthen their expressive language skills. Based on the principle of implicit learning, speech-language therapists (SLTs) typically embed target morphological structures (e.g., third person -s) into everyday interactions or game-based learning activities. Educators are recommended by SLTs to do the same. This approach demands precise linguistic knowledge and real-time production of various morphological forms (e.g., "Daddy wears these when he drives to work"). The task becomes even more demanding when educators or parent also must keep children engaged and manage turn-taking in a game-based activity. In the TalBot project our multiprofessional team have developed an application in which the Furhat conversational robot plays the word retrieval game "Alias" with children to improve language skills. Our application currently employs a large language model (LLM) to manage gameplay, dialogue, affective responses, and turn-taking. Our next step is to further leverage the capacity of LLMs so the robot can generate and deliver specific morphological targets during the game. We hypothesize that a robot could outperform humans at this task. Novel aspects of this approach are that the robot could ultimately serve as a model and tutor for both children and professionals and that using LLM capabilities in this context would support basic communication needs for children with language vulnerabilities. Our long-term goal is to create a robust LLM-based Robot-Assisted Language Learning intervention capable of teaching a variety of morphological structures across different languages.

Stina Sundstedt
Mattias Wingren
Susanne Hägglund
Daniel Ventus


Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data

Abstract: Recent advances in generalist robot manipulation leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large-scale robot demonstrations to tackle diverse tasks in a zero-shot manner. A key challenge remains: scaling high-quality, action-labeled robot demonstration data, which existing methods rely on for robustness and generalization. To address this, we propose a method that benefits from videos without action labels - featuring humans and/or robots in action - enhancing open-vocabulary performance and enabling data-efficient learning of new tasks. Our method extracts dense, dynamic 3D point clouds at the hand or gripper location and uses a proposed 3D dynamics predictor for self-supervision. This predictor is then tuned to an action predictor using a smaller labeled dataset for action alignment. We show that our method not only learns from unlabeled human and robot demonstrations - improving downstream generalist robot policies - but also enables robots to learn new tasks without action labels (i.e., out-of-action generalization) in both real-world and simulated settings.

Alexander Spiridonov
Jan-Nico Zaech
Nikolay Nikolov
Luc Van Gool
Danda Pani Paudel


LayoutAgent: A Vision-Language Agent Guided Compositional Diffusion for Spatial Layout Planning

Abstract: Designing realistic multi-object scenes requires not only generating images, but also planning spatial layouts that respect semantic relations and physical plausibility. On one hand, while recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality image generation, they lack explicit spatial reasoning, leading to unrealistic object layouts. On the other hand, traditional spatial planning methods in robotics emphasize geometric and relational consistency, but they struggle to capture semantic richness in visual scenes. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose LayoutAgent, an agentic framework that unifies vision-language reasoning with compositional diffusion for layout generation. Given multiple input images with target objects in them, our method first employs visual-language model to preprocess the inputs through segmentation, object size estimation, scene graph construction, and prompt rewriting. Then we leverage compositional diffusion-a method traditionally used in robotics-to synthesize bounding boxes that respect object relations encoded in the scene graph for spatial layouts. In the end, a foreground-conditioned image generator composes the complete scene by rendering the objects into the planned layout guided by designed prompts. Experiments demonstrate that LayoutAgent outperforms other state-of-the-art layout generation models in layout coherence, spatial realism and aesthetic alignment.

Zezhong Fan
Xiaohan Li
Luyi Ma
Kai Zhao
Liang Peng
Topojoy Biswas
Evren Korpeoglu
Kaushiki Nag
Kannan Achan


Pure Vision Language Action (VLA) Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract: The emergence of Vision Language Action (VLA) models marks a paradigm shift from traditional policy-based control to generalized robotics, reframing Vision Language Models (VLMs) from passive sequence generators into active agents for manipulation and decision-making in complex, dynamic environments. This survey delves into advanced VLA methods, aiming to provide a clear taxonomy and a systematic, comprehensive review of existing research. It presents a comprehensive analysis of VLA applications across different scenarios and classifies VLA approaches into several paradigms: autoregression-based, diffusion-based, reinforcement-based, hybrid, and specialized methods; while examining their motivations, core strategies, and implementations in detail. In addition, foundational datasets, benchmarks, and simulation platforms are introduced. Building on the current VLA landscape, the review further proposes perspectives on key challenges and future directions to advance research in VLA models and generalizable robotics. By synthesizing insights from over three hundred recent studies, this survey maps the contours of this rapidly evolving field and highlights the opportunities and challenges that will shape the development of scalable, general-purpose VLA methods.

Dapeng Zhang
Jing Sun
Chenghui Hu
Xiaoyan Wu
Zhenlong Yuan
Rui Zhou
Fei Shen
Qingguo Zhou


Bi-VLA: Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning via Vision-Language Fusion for Action Generation

Abstract: We propose Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning via Vision-Language Fusion for Action Generation (Bi-VLA), a novel framework that extends bilateral control-based imitation learning to handle more than one task within a single model. Conventional bilateral control methods exploit joint angle, velocity, torque, and vision for precise manipulation but require task-specific models, limiting their generality. Bi-VLA overcomes this limitation by utilizing robot joint angle, velocity, and torque data from leader-follower bilateral control with visual features and natural language instructions through SigLIP and FiLM-based fusion. We validated Bi-VLA on two task types: one requiring supplementary language cues and another distinguishable solely by vision. Real-robot experiments showed that Bi-VLA successfully interprets vision-language combinations and improves task success rates compared to conventional bilateral control-based imitation learning. Our Bi-VLA addresses the single-task limitation of prior bilateral approaches and provides empirical evidence that combining vision and language significantly enhances versatility. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Bi-VLA in real-world tasks. For additional material, please visit the website: https://mertcookimg.github.io/bi-vla/

Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts


Anatomy of a Feeling: Narrating Embodied Emotions via Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: The embodiment of emotional reactions from body parts contains rich information about our affective experiences. We propose a framework that utilizes state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs) to generate Embodied LVLM Emotion Narratives (ELENA). These are well-defined, multi-layered text outputs, primarily comprising descriptions that focus on the salient body parts involved in emotional reactions. We also employ attention maps and observe that contemporary models exhibit a persistent bias towards the facial region. Despite this limitation, we observe that our employed framework can effectively recognize embodied emotions in face-masked images, outperforming baselines without any fine-tuning. ELENA opens a new trajectory for embodied emotion analysis across the modality of vision and enriches modeling in an affect-aware setting.

Mohammad Saim
Phan Anh Duong
Cat Luong
Aniket Bhanderi
Tianyu Jiang

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing


Eva-VLA: Evaluating Vision-Language-Action Models' Robustness Under Real-World Physical Variations

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as promising solutions for robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to real-world physical variations remains critically underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose Eva-VLA, the first unified framework to systematically evaluate the robustness of VLA models by formulating uncontrollable physical variations as continuous optimization problems. Specifically, our framework addresses two fundamental challenges in VLA models' physical robustness evaluation: 1) how to systematically characterize diverse physical perturbations encountered in real-world deployment while maintaining reproducibility, and 2) how to efficiently discover worst-case scenarios without incurring prohibitive real-world data collection costs. To tackle the first challenge, we decouple real-world variations into three key dimensions: 3D object transformations that affect spatial reasoning, illumination changes that challenge visual perception, and adversarial regions that disrupt scene understanding. For the second challenge, we introduce a continuous black-box optimization mechanism that maps these perturbations into a continuous parameter space, enabling the systematic exploration of worst-case scenarios. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, OpenVLA exhibits an average failure rate of over 90% across three physical variations on the LIBERO-Long task, exposing critical systemic fragilities. Furthermore, applying the generated worst-case scenarios during adversarial training quantifiably increases model robustness, validating the effectiveness of this approach. Our evaluation exposes the gap between laboratory and real-world conditions, while the Eva-VLA framework can serve as an effective data augmentation method to enhance the resilience of robotic manipulation systems.

Hanqing Liu
Shouwei Ruan
Jiahuan Long
Junqi Wu
Jiacheng Hou
Huili Tang
Tingsong Jiang
Weien Zhou
Wen Yao


A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Robotic real-world reinforcement learning (RL) with vision-language-action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by sparse, handcrafted rewards and inefficient exploration. We introduce VLAC, a general process reward model built upon InternVL and trained on large scale heterogeneous datasets. Given pairwise observations and a language goal, it outputs dense progress delta and done signal, eliminating task-specific reward engineering, and supports one-shot in-context transfer to unseen tasks and environments. VLAC is trained on vision-language datasets to strengthen perception, dialogic and reasoning capabilities, together with robot and human trajectories data that ground action generation and progress estimation, and additionally strengthened to reject irrelevant prompts as well as detect regression or stagnation by constructing large numbers of negative and semantically mismatched samples. With prompt control, a single VLAC model alternately generating reward and action tokens, unifying critic and policy. Deployed inside an asynchronous real-world RL loop, we layer a graded human-in-the-loop protocol (offline demonstration replay, return and explore, human guided explore) that accelerates exploration and stabilizes early learning. Across four distinct real-world manipulation tasks, VLAC lifts success rates from about 30\% to about 90\% within 200 real-world interaction episodes; incorporating human-in-the-loop interventions yields a further 50% improvement in sample efficiency and achieves up to 100% final success.

Shaopeng Zhai
Qi Zhang
Tianyi Zhang
Fuxian Huang
Haoran Zhang
Ming Zhou
Shengzhe Zhang
Litao Liu
Sixu Lin
Jiangmiao Pang


Toward Embodiment Equivariant Vision-Language-Action Policy

Abstract: Vision-language-action policies learn manipulation skills across tasks, environments and embodiments through large-scale pre-training. However, their ability to generalize to novel robot configurations remains limited. Most approaches emphasize model size, dataset scale and diversity while paying less attention to the design of action spaces. This leads to the configuration generalization problem, which requires costly adaptation. We address this challenge by formulating cross-embodiment pre-training as designing policies equivariant to embodiment configuration transformations. Building on this principle, we propose a framework that (i) establishes a embodiment equivariance theory for action space and policy design, (ii) introduces an action decoder that enforces configuration equivariance, and (iii) incorporates a geometry-aware network architecture to enhance embodiment-agnostic spatial reasoning. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach improves pre-training effectiveness and enables efficient fine-tuning on novel robot embodiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/hhcaz/e2vla

Anzhe Chen
Yifei Yang
Zhenjie Zhu
Kechun Xu
Zhongxiang Zhou
Rong Xiong
Yue Wang


RealMirror: A Comprehensive, Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Platform for Embodied AI

Abstract: The emerging field of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) for humanoid robots faces several fundamental challenges, including the high cost of data acquisition, the lack of a standardized benchmark, and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. To overcome these obstacles, we propose RealMirror, a comprehensive, open-source embodied AI VLA platform. RealMirror builds an efficient, low-cost data collection, model training, and inference system that enables end-to-end VLA research without requiring a real robot. To facilitate model evolution and fair comparison, we also introduce a dedicated VLA benchmark for humanoid robots, featuring multiple scenarios, extensive trajectories, and various VLA models. Furthermore, by integrating generative models and 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct realistic environments and robot models, we successfully demonstrate zero-shot Sim2Real transfer, where models trained exclusively on simulation data can perform tasks on a real robot seamlessly, without any fine-tuning. In conclusion, with the unification of these critical components, RealMirror provides a robust framework that significantly accelerates the development of VLA models for humanoid robots. Project page: https://terminators2025.github.io/RealMirror.github.io

Cong Tai
Zhaoyu Zheng
Haixu Long
Hansheng Wu
Haodong Xiang
Zhengbin Long
Jun Xiong
Rong Shi
Shizhuang Zhang
Gang Qiu
He Wang
Ruifeng Li
Jun Huang
Bin Chang
Shuai Feng
Tao Shen


Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive, Unified, and Evolving Evaluation Platform for Embodied AI

Abstract: Embodied AI development significantly lags behind large foundation models due to three critical challenges: (1) lack of systematic understanding of core capabilities needed for Embodied AI, making research lack clear objectives; (2) absence of unified and standardized evaluation systems, rendering cross-benchmark evaluation infeasible; and (3) underdeveloped automated and scalable acquisition methods for embodied data, creating critical bottlenecks for model scaling. To address these obstacles, we present Embodied Arena, a comprehensive, unified, and evolving evaluation platform for Embodied AI. Our platform establishes a systematic embodied capability taxonomy spanning three levels (perception, reasoning, task execution), seven core capabilities, and 25 fine-grained dimensions, enabling unified evaluation with systematic research objectives. We introduce a standardized evaluation system built upon unified infrastructure supporting flexible integration of 22 diverse benchmarks across three domains (2D/3D Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) and 30+ advanced models from 20+ worldwide institutes. Additionally, we develop a novel LLM-driven automated generation pipeline ensuring scalable embodied evaluation data with continuous evolution for diversity and comprehensiveness. Embodied Arena publishes three real-time leaderboards (Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) with dual perspectives (benchmark view and capability view), providing comprehensive overviews of advanced model capabilities. Especially, we present nine findings summarized from the evaluation results on the leaderboards of Embodied Arena. This helps to establish clear research veins and pinpoint critical research problems, thereby driving forward progress in the field of Embodied AI.

Fei Ni
Min Zhang
Pengyi Li
Yifu Yuan
Lingfeng Zhang
Yuecheng Liu
Peilong Han
Longxin Kou
Shaojin Ma
Jinbin Qiao
David Gamaliel Arcos Bravo
Yuening Wang
Xiao Hu
Zhanguang Zhang
Xianze Yao
Yutong Li
Zhao Zhang
Ying Wen
Ying-Cong Chen
Xiaodan Liang
Liang Lin
Bin He
Haitham Bou-Ammar
He Wang
Huazhe Xu
Jiankang Deng
Shan Luo
Shuqiang Jiang
Wei Pan
Yang Gao
Stefanos Zafeiriou
Jan Peters
Yuzheng Zhuang
Yingxue Zhang
Yan Zheng
Hongyao Tang
Jianye Hao


GeoAware-VLA: Implicit Geometry Aware Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often fail to generalize to unseen camera viewpoints, a limitation stemming from their difficulty in inferring robust 3D geometry from 2D images. We introduce GeoAware-VLA, a simple yet effective approach that enhances viewpoint invariance by integrating strong geometric priors into the vision backbone. Instead of training a visual encoder or relying on explicit 3D data, we leverage a frozen, pretrained geometric vision model as a feature extractor. A lightweight, trainable projection layer then adapts these geometrically-rich features for the policy decoder, relieving it of the burden of learning 3D consistency from scratch. Through extensive evaluations on the LIBERO and CALVIN benchmarks, we show that GeoAware-VLA preserves and even improves in-distribution performance while achieving substantial gains in zero-shot generalization to unseen camera poses, improving unseen-view success rates by an average of 35 percentage points on LIBERO and over 11 percentage points on CALVIN compared to their respective baselines. Crucially, these gains transfer to the physical world, where our model shows significant improvement on a real robotic platform. Our approach proves effective across both continuous and discrete action spaces, highlighting that robust geometric grounding is a key ingredient for building more generalizable robotic agents.

Ali Abouzeid
Malak Mansour
Qinbo Sun
Zezhou Sun
Dezhen Song


CLAW: A Vision-Language-Action Framework for Weight-Aware Robotic Grasping

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control, enabling end-to-end policies that ground natural language instructions into visuomotor actions. However, current VLAs often struggle to satisfy precise task constraints, such as stopping based on numeric thresholds, since their observation-to-action mappings are implicitly shaped by training data and lack explicit mechanisms for condition monitoring. In this work, we propose CLAW (CLIP-Language-Action for Weight), a framework that decouples condition evaluation from action generation. CLAW leverages a fine-tuned CLIP model as a lightweight prompt generator, which continuously monitors the digital readout of a scale and produces discrete directives based on task-specific weight thresholds. These prompts are then consumed by $π_0$, a flow-based VLA policy, which integrates the prompts with multi-view camera observations to produce continuous robot actions. This design enables CLAW to combine symbolic weight reasoning with high-frequency visuomotor control. We validate CLAW on three experimental setups: single-object grasping and mixed-object tasks requiring dual-arm manipulation. Across all conditions, CLAW reliably executes weight-aware behaviors and outperforms both raw-$π_0$ and fine-tuned $π_0$ models. A video of our paper is available online https://youtu.be/MuMYj2QgReI.

Zijian An
Ran Yang
Yiming Feng
Lifeng Zhou


PANORAMA: The Rise of Omnidirectional Vision in the Embodied AI Era

Abstract: Omnidirectional vision, using 360-degree vision to understand the environment, has become increasingly critical across domains like robotics, industrial inspection, and environmental monitoring. Compared to traditional pinhole vision, omnidirectional vision provides holistic environmental awareness, significantly enhancing the completeness of scene perception and the reliability of decision-making. However, foundational research in this area has historically lagged behind traditional pinhole vision. This talk presents an emerging trend in the embodied AI era: the rapid development of omnidirectional vision, driven by growing industrial demand and academic interest. We highlight recent breakthroughs in omnidirectional generation, omnidirectional perception, omnidirectional understanding, and related datasets. Drawing on insights from both academia and industry, we propose an ideal panoramic system architecture in the embodied AI era, PANORAMA, which consists of four key subsystems. Moreover, we offer in-depth opinions related to emerging trends and cross-community impacts at the intersection of panoramic vision and embodied AI, along with the future roadmap and open challenges. This overview synthesizes state-of-the-art advancements and outlines challenges and opportunities for future research in building robust, general-purpose omnidirectional AI systems in the embodied AI era.

Xu Zheng
Chenfei Liao
Ziqiao Weng
Kaiyu Lei
Zihao Dongfang
Haocong He
Yuanhuiyi Lyu
Lutao Jiang
Lu Qi
Li Chen
Danda Pani Paudel
Kailun Yang
Linfeng Zhang
Luc Van Gool
Xuming Hu


Enhancing Generalization in Vision-Language-Action Models by Preserving Pretrained Representations

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models finetuned from vision-language models (VLMs) hold the promise of leveraging rich pretrained representations to build generalist robots across diverse tasks and environments. However, direct fine-tuning on robot data often disrupts these representations and limits generalization. We present a framework that better preserves pretrained features while adapting them for robot manipulation. Our approach introduces three components: (i) a dual-encoder design with one frozen vision encoder to retain pretrained features and another trainable for task adaptation, (ii) a string-based action tokenizer that casts continuous actions into character sequences aligned with the model's pretraining domain, and (iii) a co-training strategy that combines robot demonstrations with vision-language datasets emphasizing spatial reasoning and affordances. Evaluations in simulation and on real robots show that our method improves robustness to visual perturbations, generalization to novel instructions and environments, and overall task success compared to baselines.

Shresth Grover
Akshay Gopalkrishnan
Bo Ai
Henrik I. Christensen
Hao Su
Xuanlin Li


VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks demonstrate that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model in just 8 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying the VLA model. Project page: https://vla-adapter.github.io/.

Yihao Wang
Pengxiang Ding
Lingxiao Li
Can Cui
Zirui Ge
Xinyang Tong
Wenxuan Song
Han Zhao
Wei Zhao
Pengxu Hou
Siteng Huang
Yifan Tang
Wenhui Wang
Ru Zhang
Jianyi Liu
Donglin Wang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence


SQAP-VLA: A Synergistic Quantization-Aware Pruning Framework for High-Performance Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit unprecedented capabilities for embodied intelligence. However, their extensive computational and memory costs hinder their practical deployment. Existing VLA compression and acceleration approaches conduct quantization or token pruning in an ad-hoc manner but fail to enable both for a holistic efficiency improvement due to an observed incompatibility. This work introduces SQAP-VLA, the first structured, training-free VLA inference acceleration framework that simultaneously enables state-of-the-art quantization and token pruning. We overcome the incompatibility by co-designing the quantization and token pruning pipeline, where we propose new quantization-aware token pruning criteria that work on an aggressively quantized model while improving the quantizer design to enhance pruning effectiveness. When applied to standard VLA models, SQAP-VLA yields significant gains in computational efficiency and inference speed while successfully preserving core model performance, achieving a $\times$1.93 speedup and up to a 4.5\% average success rate enhancement compared to the original model.

Hengyu Fang
Yijiang Liu
Yuan Du
Li Du
Huanrui Yang


TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Many robotic manipulation tasks require sensing and responding to force signals such as torque to assess whether the task has been successfully completed and to enable closed-loop control. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models lack the ability to integrate such subtle physical feedback. In this work, we explore Torque-aware VLA models, aiming to bridge this gap by systematically studying the design space for incorporating torque signals into existing VLA architectures. We identify and evaluate several strategies, leading to three key findings. First, introducing torque adapters into the decoder consistently outperforms inserting them into the encoder.Third, inspired by joint prediction and planning paradigms in autonomous driving, we propose predicting torque as an auxiliary output, which further improves performance. This strategy encourages the model to build a physically grounded internal representation of interaction dynamics. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments across contact-rich manipulation benchmarks validate our findings.

Zongzheng Zhang
Haobo Xu
Zhuo Yang
Chenghao Yue
Zehao Lin
Huan-ang Gao
Ziwei Wang
Hao Zhao


LLaDA-VLA: Vision Language Diffusion Action Models

Abstract: The rapid progress of auto-regressive vision-language models (VLMs) has inspired growing interest in vision-language-action models (VLA) for robotic manipulation. Recently, masked diffusion models, a paradigm distinct from autoregressive models, have begun to demonstrate competitive performance in text generation and multimodal applications, leading to the development of a series of diffusion-based VLMs (d-VLMs). However, leveraging such models for robot policy learning remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present LLaDA-VLA, the first Vision-Language-Diffusion-Action model built upon pretrained d-VLMs for robotic manipulation. To effectively adapt d-VLMs to robotic domain, we introduce two key designs: (1) a localized special-token classification strategy that replaces full-vocabulary classification with special action token classification, reducing adaptation difficulty; (2) a hierarchical action-structured decoding strategy that decodes action sequences hierarchically considering the dependencies within and across actions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaDA-VLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VLAs on both simulation and real-world robots.

Yuqing Wen
Hebei Li
Kefan Gu
Yucheng Zhao
Tiancai Wang
Xiaoyan Sun


F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actions

Abstract: Executing language-conditioned tasks in dynamic visual environments remains a central challenge in embodied AI. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt reactive state-to-action mappings, often leading to short-sighted behaviors and poor robustness in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we introduce F1, a pretrained VLA framework which integrates the visual foresight generation into decision-making pipeline. F1 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformer architecture with dedicated modules for perception, foresight generation, and control, thereby bridging understanding, generation, and actions. At its core, F1 employs a next-scale prediction mechanism to synthesize goal-conditioned visual foresight as explicit planning targets. By forecasting plausible future visual states, F1 reformulates action generation as a foresight-guided inverse dynamics problem, enabling actions that implicitly achieve visual goals. To endow F1 with robust and generalizable capabilities, we propose a three-stage training recipe on an extensive dataset comprising over 330k trajectories across 136 diverse tasks. This training scheme enhances modular reasoning and equips the model with transferable visual foresight, which is critical for complex and dynamic environments. Extensive evaluations on real-world tasks and simulation benchmarks demonstrate F1 consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving substantial gains in both task success rate and generalization ability.

Qi Lv
Weijie Kong
Hao Li
Jia Zeng
Zherui Qiu
Delin Qu
Haoming Song
Qizhi Chen
Xiang Deng
Jiangmiao Pang


Embodied Hazard Mitigation using Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Abstract: Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments should identify and report anomalies. Embodying proactive mitigation improves safety and operational continuity. This paper presents a multimodal anomaly detection and mitigation system that integrates vision-language models and large language models to identify and report hazardous situations and conflicts in real-time. The proposed system enables robots to perceive, interpret, report, and if possible respond to urban and environmental anomalies through proactive detection mechanisms and automated mitigation actions. A key contribution in this paper is the integration of Hazardous and Conflict states into the robot's decision-making framework, where each anomaly type can trigger specific mitigation strategies. User studies (n = 30) demonstrated the effectiveness of the system in anomaly detection with 91.2% prediction accuracy and relatively low latency response times using edge-ai architecture.

Oluwadamilola Sotomi
Devika Kodi
Kiruthiga Chandra Shekar
Aliasghar Arab


O$^3$Afford: One-Shot 3D Object-to-Object Affordance Grounding for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: Grounding object affordance is fundamental to robotic manipulation as it establishes the critical link between perception and action among interacting objects. However, prior works predominantly focus on predicting single-object affordance, overlooking the fact that most real-world interactions involve relationships between pairs of objects. In this work, we address the challenge of object-to-object affordance grounding under limited data contraints. Inspired by recent advances in few-shot learning with 2D vision foundation models, we propose a novel one-shot 3D object-to-object affordance learning approach for robotic manipulation. Semantic features from vision foundation models combined with point cloud representation for geometric understanding enable our one-shot learning pipeline to generalize effectively to novel objects and categories. We further integrate our 3D affordance representation with large language models (LLMs) for robotics manipulation, significantly enhancing LLMs' capability to comprehend and reason about object interactions when generating task-specific constraint functions. Our experiments on 3D object-to-object affordance grounding and robotic manipulation demonstrate that our O$^3$Afford significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of both accuracy and generalization capability.


SpecPrune-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Models via Action-Aware Self-Speculative Pruning

Abstract: Pruning is a typical acceleration technique for compute-bound models by removing computation on unimportant values. Recently, it has been applied to accelerate Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model inference. However, existing acceleration methods focus on local information from the current action step and ignore the global context, leading to >20% success rate drop and limited speedup in some scenarios. In this paper, we point out spatial-temporal consistency in VLA tasks: input images in consecutive steps exhibit high similarity, and propose the key insight that token selection should combine local information with global context of the model. Based on this, we propose SpecPrune-VLA, a training-free, two-level pruning method with heuristic control. (1) Action-level static pruning. We leverage global history and local attention to statically reduce visual tokens per action. (2) Layer-level dynamic pruning. We prune tokens adaptively per layer based on layer-wise importance. (3) Lightweight action-aware controller: We classify actions as coarse- or fine-grained by the speed of the end effector and adjust pruning aggressiveness accordingly. Extensive experiments show that SpecPrune-VLA achieves up to 1.57$\times$ speedup in LIBERO simulation and 1.70$\times$ on real-world tasks, with negligible success rate degradation.

Hanzhen Wang
Jiaming Xu
Yushun Xiang
Jiayi Pan
Yongkang Zhou
Yong-Lu Li
Guohao Dai


FPC-VLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework with a Supervisor for Failure Prediction and Correction

Abstract: Robotic manipulation is a fundamental component of automation. However, traditional perception-planning pipelines often fall short in open-ended tasks due to limited flexibility, while the architecture of a single end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) offers promising capabilities but lacks crucial mechanisms for anticipating and recovering from failure. To address these challenges, we propose FPC-VLA, a dual-model framework that integrates VLA with a supervisor for failure prediction and correction. The supervisor evaluates action viability through vision-language queries and generates corrective strategies when risks arise, trained efficiently without manual labeling. A dual-stream fusion module further refines actions by leveraging past predictions. Evaluation results on multiple simulation platforms (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and robot embodiments (WidowX, Google Robot, Franka) show that FPC-VLA outperforms state-of-the-art models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Successful real-world deployments on diverse, long-horizon tasks confirm FPC-VLA's strong generalization and practical utility for building more reliable autonomous systems.

Yifan Yang
Zhixiang Duan
Tianshi Xie
Fuyu Cao
Pinxi Shen
Peili Song
Piaopiao Jin
Guokang Sun
Shaoqing Xu
Yangwei You
Jingtai Liu


Mechanistic interpretability for steering vision-language-action models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of classical robotics pipelines, which are grounded in explicit models of kinematics, dynamics, and control. This lack of mechanistic insight is a central challenge for deploying learned policies in real-world robotics, where robustness and explainability are critical. Motivated by advances in mechanistic interpretability for large language models, we introduce the first framework for interpreting and steering VLAs via their internal representations, enabling direct intervention in model behavior at inference time. We project feedforward activations within transformer layers onto the token embedding basis, identifying sparse semantic directions - such as speed and direction - that are causally linked to action selection. Leveraging these findings, we introduce a general-purpose activation steering method that modulates behavior in real time, without fine-tuning, reward signals, or environment interaction. We evaluate this method on two recent open-source VLAs, Pi0 and OpenVLA, and demonstrate zero-shot behavioral control in simulation (LIBERO) and on a physical robot (UR5). This work demonstrates that interpretable components of embodied VLAs can be systematically harnessed for control - establishing a new paradigm for transparent and steerable foundation models in robotics.

Bear Häon
Kaylene Stocking
Ian Chuang
Claire Tomlin


Generative Visual Foresight Meets Task-Agnostic Pose Estimation in Robotic Table-Top Manipulation

Abstract: Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires systems that can generalize across diverse tasks while maintaining robust and reliable performance. We introduce {GVF-TAPE}, a closed-loop framework that combines generative visual foresight with task-agnostic pose estimation to enable scalable robotic manipulation. GVF-TAPE employs a generative video model to predict future RGB-D frames from a single side-view RGB image and a task description, offering visual plans that guide robot actions. A decoupled pose estimation model then extracts end-effector poses from the predicted frames, translating them into executable commands via low-level controllers. By iteratively integrating video foresight and pose estimation in a closed loop, GVF-TAPE achieves real-time, adaptive manipulation across a broad range of tasks. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach reduces reliance on task-specific action data and generalizes effectively, providing a practical and scalable solution for intelligent robotic systems.

Chuye Zhang
Xiaoxiong Zhang
Wei Pan
Linfang Zheng
Wei Zhang


EO-1: An Open Unified Embodied Foundation Model for General Robot Control

Abstract: The human ability to seamlessly perform multimodal reasoning and physical interaction in the open world is a core goal for general purpose embodied intelligent systems. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models, which are co-trained on large-scale robot and visual-text data, have demonstrated notable progress in general robot control. However, they still fail to achieve human-level flexibility in interleaved reasoning and interaction. In this work, we introduce EO-Robotics, consists of EO-1 model and EO-Data1.5M dataset. EO-1 is a unified embodied foundation model that achieves superior performance in multimodal embodied reasoning and robot control through interleaved vision-text-action pre-training. The development of EO-1 is based on two key pillars: (i) a unified architecture that processes multimodal inputs indiscriminately (image, text, video, and action), and (ii) a massive, high-quality multimodal embodied reasoning dataset, EO-Data1.5M, which contains over 1.5 million samples with emphasis on interleaved vision-text-action comprehension. EO-1 is trained through synergies between auto-regressive decoding and flow matching denoising on EO-Data1.5M, enabling seamless robot action generation and multimodal embodied reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of interleaved vision-text-action learning for open-world understanding and generalization, validated through a variety of long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks across multiple embodiments. This paper details the architecture of EO-1, the data construction strategy of EO-Data1.5M, and the training methodology, offering valuable insights for developing advanced embodied foundation models. Project Page: https://eo-robotics.ai/eo-1.

Delin Qu
Haoming Song
Qizhi Chen
Zhaoqing Chen
Xianqiang Gao
Dong Wang
Xinyi Ye
Qi Lv
Modi Shi
Guanghui Ren
Cheng Ruan
Maoqing Yao
Haoran Yang
Jiacheng Bao
Bin Zhao
Xuelong Li


Long-VLA: Unleashing Long-Horizon Capability of Vision Language Action Model for Robot Manipulation

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a cornerstone in robotic policy learning, leveraging large-scale multimodal data for robust and scalable control. However, existing VLA frameworks primarily address short-horizon tasks, and their effectiveness on long-horizon, multi-step robotic manipulation remains limited due to challenges in skill chaining and subtask dependencies. In this work, we introduce Long-VLA, the first end-to-end VLA model specifically designed for long-horizon robotic tasks. Our approach features a novel phase-aware input masking strategy that adaptively segments each subtask into moving and interaction phases, enabling the model to focus on phase-relevant sensory cues and enhancing subtask compatibility. This unified strategy preserves the scalability and data efficiency of VLA training, and our architecture-agnostic module can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLA models. We further propose the L-CALVIN benchmark to systematically evaluate long-horizon manipulation. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world tasks demonstrate that Long-VLA significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new baseline for long-horizon robotic control.

Yiguo Fan
Pengxiang Ding
Shuanghao Bai
Xinyang Tong
Yuyang Zhu
Hongchao Lu
Fengqi Dai
Wei Zhao
Yang Liu
Siteng Huang
Zhaoxin Fan
Badong Chen
Donglin Wang


Discrete Diffusion VLA: Bringing Discrete Diffusion to Action Decoding in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions into robot actions. However, prevailing VLAs either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order with poor performance or attach separate diffusion heads outside the backbone that fragments information pathways and hinders unified, scalable architectures. Instead, we present Discrete Diffusion VLA that discretizes action chunks and models them with discrete diffusion pattern retaining progressive refinement inside the unified transformer backbone. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves high-confidence action elements before harder ones and employs secondary re-masking to revisit uncertain predictions, enabling robust error correction. This design preserves pretrained vision-language priors, supports parallel decoding, and improves the efficiency. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.4% avg. success on LIBERO, 71.2% visual matching on SimplerEnv-Fractal, and 54.2% overall on SimplerEnv-Bridge. On out-of-distribution tests of LIBERO-Goal, our method exhibits only 0.8% language degradation versus 8.0% of parallel decoding, and 20.4% vision degradation versus 29.0% for continuous diffusion, demonstrating well retention of pretrained vision-language capabilities. We also conduct two real-robot evaluations on AgileX Cobot Magic platform to show the method's effectiveness.

Zhixuan Liang
Yizhuo Li
Tianshuo Yang
Chengyue Wu
Sitong Mao
Liuao Pei
Tian Nian
Shunbo Zhou
Xiaokang Yang
Jiangmiao Pang
Yao Mu
Ping Luo


Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review

Abstract: The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.


Survey of Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied Manipulation

Abstract: Embodied intelligence systems, which enhance agent capabilities through continuous environment interactions, have garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. Vision-Language-Action models, inspired by advancements in large foundation models, serve as universal robotic control frameworks that substantially improve agent-environment interaction capabilities in embodied intelligence systems. This expansion has broadened application scenarios for embodied AI robots. This survey comprehensively reviews VLA models for embodied manipulation. Firstly, it chronicles the developmental trajectory of VLA architectures. Subsequently, we conduct a detailed analysis of current research across 5 critical dimensions: VLA model structures, training datasets, pre-training methods, post-training methods, and model evaluation. Finally, we synthesize key challenges in VLA development and real-world deployment, while outlining promising future research directions.

Haoran Li
Yuhui Chen
Wenbo Cui
Weiheng Liu
Kai Liu
Mingcai Zhou
Zhengtao Zhang
Dongbin Zhao


Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

Yifu Yuan
Haiqin Cui
Yaoting Huang
Yibin Chen
Fei Ni
Zibin Dong
Pengyi Li
Yan Zheng
Hongyao Tang
Jianye Hao


RynnEC: Bringing MLLMs into Embodied World

Abstract: We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC

Ronghao Dang
Yuqian Yuan
Yunxuan Mao
Kehan Li
Jiangpin Liu
Zhikai Wang
Xin Li
Fan Wang
Deli Zhao


Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey

Abstract: Robotic manipulation, a key frontier in robotics and embodied AI, requires precise motor control and multimodal understanding, yet traditional rule-based methods fail to scale or generalize in unstructured, novel environments. In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, built upon Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) pretrained on vast image-text datasets, have emerged as a transformative paradigm. This survey provides the first systematic, taxonomy-oriented review of large VLM-based VLA models for robotic manipulation. We begin by clearly defining large VLM-based VLA models and delineating two principal architectural paradigms: (1) monolithic models, encompassing single-system and dual-system designs with differing levels of integration; and (2) hierarchical models, which explicitly decouple planning from execution via interpretable intermediate representations. Building on this foundation, we present an in-depth examination of large VLM-based VLA models: (1) integration with advanced domains, including reinforcement learning, training-free optimization, learning from human videos, and world model integration; (2) synthesis of distinctive characteristics, consolidating architectural traits, operational strengths, and the datasets and benchmarks that support their development; (3) identification of promising directions, including memory mechanisms, 4D perception, efficient adaptation, multi-agent cooperation, and other emerging capabilities. This survey consolidates recent advances to resolve inconsistencies in existing taxonomies, mitigate research fragmentation, and fill a critical gap through the systematic integration of studies at the intersection of large VLMs and robotic manipulation. We provide a regularly updated project page to document ongoing progress: https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/Large-VLM-based-VLA-for-Robotic-Manipulation

Rui Shao
Wei Li
Lingsen Zhang
Renshan Zhang
Zhiyang Liu
Ran Chen
Liqiang Nie


Grounding Actions in Camera Space: Observation-Centric Vision-Language-Action Policy

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models frequently encounter challenges in generalizing to real-world environments due to inherent discrepancies between observation and action spaces. Although training data are collected from diverse camera perspectives, the models typically predict end-effector poses within the robot base coordinate frame, resulting in spatial inconsistencies. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce the Observation-Centric VLA (OC-VLA) framework, which grounds action predictions directly in the camera observation space. Leveraging the camera's extrinsic calibration matrix, OC-VLA transforms end-effector poses from the robot base coordinate system into the camera coordinate system, thereby unifying prediction targets across heterogeneous viewpoints. This lightweight, plug-and-play strategy ensures robust alignment between perception and action, substantially improving model resilience to camera viewpoint variations. The proposed approach is readily compatible with existing VLA architectures, requiring no substantial modifications. Comprehensive evaluations on both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that OC-VLA accelerates convergence, enhances task success rates, and improves cross-view generalization. The code will be publicly available.

Tianyi Zhang
Haonan Duan
Haoran Hao
Yu Qiao
Jifeng Dai
Zhi Hou


TTF-VLA: Temporal Token Fusion via Pixel-Attention Integration for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models process visual inputs independently at each timestep, discarding valuable temporal information inherent in robotic manipulation tasks. This frame-by-frame processing makes models vulnerable to visual noise while ignoring the substantial coherence between consecutive frames in manipulation sequences. We propose Temporal Token Fusion (TTF), a training-free approach that intelligently integrates historical and current visual representations to enhance VLA inference quality. Our method employs dual-dimension detection combining efficient grayscale pixel difference analysis with attention-based semantic relevance assessment, enabling selective temporal token fusion through hard fusion strategies and keyframe anchoring to prevent error accumulation. Comprehensive experiments across LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and real robot tasks demonstrate consistent improvements: 4.0 percentage points average on LIBERO (72.4\% vs 68.4\% baseline), cross-environment validation on SimplerEnv (4.8\% relative improvement), and 8.7\% relative improvement on real robot tasks. Our approach proves model-agnostic, working across OpenVLA and VLA-Cache architectures. Notably, TTF reveals that selective Query matrix reuse in attention mechanisms enhances rather than compromises performance, suggesting promising directions for direct KQV matrix reuse strategies that achieve computational acceleration while improving task success rates.

Chenghao Liu
Jiachen Zhang
Chengxuan Li
Zhimu Zhou
Shixin Wu
Songfang Huang
Huiling Duan


ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver

Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robotic agents to integrate multimodal understanding with action execution. However, our empirical analysis reveals that current VLAs struggle to allocate visual attention to target regions. Instead, visual attention is always dispersed. To guide the visual attention grounding on the correct target, we propose ReconVLA, a reconstructive VLA model with an implicit grounding paradigm. Conditioned on the model's visual outputs, a diffusion transformer aims to reconstruct the gaze region of the image, which corresponds to the target manipulated objects. This process prompts the VLA model to learn fine-grained representations and accurately allocate visual attention, thus effectively leveraging task-specific visual information and conducting precise manipulation. Moreover, we curate a large-scale pretraining dataset comprising over 100k trajectories and 2 million data samples from open-source robotic datasets, further boosting the model's generalization in visual reconstruction. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate the superiority of our implicit grounding method, showcasing its capabilities of precise manipulation and generalization. Our project page is https://zionchow.github.io/ReconVLA/.

Wenxuan Song
Ziyang Zhou
Han Zhao
Jiayi Chen
Pengxiang Ding
Haodong Yan
Yuxin Huang
Feilong Tang
Donglin Wang
Haoang Li


GeoVLA: Empowering 3D Representations in Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for enabling robots to follow language instructions and predict corresponding actions. However, current VLA models mainly rely on 2D visual inputs, neglecting the rich geometric information in the 3D physical world, which limits their spatial awareness and adaptability. In this paper, we present GeoVLA, a novel VLA framework that effectively integrates 3D information to advance robotic manipulation. It uses a vision-language model (VLM) to process images and language instructions,extracting fused vision-language embeddings. In parallel, it converts depth maps into point clouds and employs a customized point encoder, called Point Embedding Network, to generate 3D geometric embeddings independently. These produced embeddings are then concatenated and processed by our proposed spatial-aware action expert, called 3D-enhanced Action Expert, which combines information from different sensor modalities to produce precise action sequences. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments, GeoVLA demonstrates superior performance and robustness. It achieves state-of-the-art results in the LIBERO and ManiSkill2 simulation benchmarks and shows remarkable robustness in real-world tasks requiring height adaptability, scale awareness and viewpoint invariance.

Lin Sun
Bin Xie
Yingfei Liu
Hao Shi
Tiancai Wang
Jiale Cao


GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

Abstract: Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

Helong Huang
Min Cen
Kai Tan
Xingyue Quan
Guowei Huang
Hong Zhang


IRL-VLA: Training an Vision-Language-Action Policy via Reward World Model

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated potential in autonomous driving. However, two critical challenges hinder their development: (1) Existing VLA architectures are typically based on imitation learning in open-loop setup which tends to capture the recorded behaviors in the dataset, leading to suboptimal and constrained performance, (2) Close-loop training relies heavily on high-fidelity sensor simulation, where domain gaps and computational inefficiencies pose significant barriers. In this paper, we introduce IRL-VLA, a novel close-loop Reinforcement Learning via \textbf{I}nverse \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning reward world model with a self-built VLA approach. Our framework proceeds in a three-stage paradigm: In the first stage, we propose a VLA architecture and pretrain the VLA policy via imitation learning. In the second stage, we construct a lightweight reward world model via inverse reinforcement learning to enable efficient close-loop reward computation. To further enhance planning performance, finally, we design specialized reward world model guidence reinforcement learning via PPO(Proximal Policy Optimization) to effectively balance the safety incidents, comfortable driving, and traffic efficiency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in NAVSIM v2 end-to-end driving benchmark, 1st runner up in CVPR2025 Autonomous Grand Challenge. We hope that our framework will accelerate VLA research in close-loop autonomous driving.

Anqing Jiang
Yu Gao
Yiru Wang
Zhigang Sun
Shuo Wang
Yuwen Heng
Hao Sun
Shichen Tang
Lijuan Zhu
Jinhao Chai
Jijun Wang
Zichong Gu
Hao Jiang
Li Sun


RICL: Adding In-Context Adaptability to Pre-Trained Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Multi-task ``vision-language-action'' (VLA) models have recently demonstrated increasing promise as generalist foundation models for robotics, achieving non-trivial performance out of the box on new tasks in new environments. However, for such models to be truly useful, an end user must have easy means to teach them to improve. For language and vision models, the emergent ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a versatile and highly useful interface to easily teach new tasks with no parameter finetuning. Unfortunately, VLAs pre-trained with imitation learning objectives do not naturally acquire ICL abilities. In this paper, we demonstrate that, with the right finetuning recipe and a small robot demonstration dataset, it is possible to inject in-context adaptability post hoc into such a VLA. After retraining for in-context learning (RICL), our system permits an end user to provide a small number (10-20) of demonstrations for a new task. RICL then fetches the most relevant portions of those demonstrations into the VLA context to exploit ICL, performing the new task and boosting task performance. We apply RICL to inject ICL into the $π_{0}$-FAST VLA, and show that it permits large in-context improvements for a variety of new manipulation tasks with only 20 demonstrations per task, without any parameter updates. When parameter updates on the target task demonstrations is possible, RICL finetuning further boosts performance. We release code and model weights for RICL-$π_{0}$-FAST alongside the paper to enable, for the first time, a simple in-context learning interface for new manipulation tasks. Website: https://ricl-vla.github.io.

Kaustubh Sridhar
Souradeep Dutta
Dinesh Jayaraman
Insup Lee


FedVLA: Federated Vision-Language-Action Learning with Dual Gating Mixture-of-Experts for Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly advanced robotic manipulation by enabling robots to interpret language instructions for task execution. However, training these models often relies on large-scale user-specific data, raising concerns about privacy and security, which in turn limits their broader adoption. To address this, we propose FedVLA, the first federated VLA learning framework, enabling distributed model training that preserves data privacy without compromising performance. Our framework integrates task-aware representation learning, adaptive expert selection, and expert-driven federated aggregation, enabling efficient and privacy-preserving training of VLA models. Specifically, we introduce an Instruction Oriented Scene-Parsing mechanism, which decomposes and enhances object-level features based on task instructions, improving contextual understanding. To effectively learn diverse task patterns, we design a Dual Gating Mixture-of-Experts (DGMoE) mechanism, where not only input tokens but also self-aware experts adaptively decide their activation. Finally, we propose an Expert-Driven Aggregation strategy at the federated server, where model aggregation is guided by activated experts, ensuring effective cross-client knowledge transfer.Extensive simulations and real-world robotic experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposals. Notably, DGMoE significantly improves computational efficiency compared to its vanilla counterpart, while FedVLA achieves task success rates comparable to centralized training, effectively preserving data privacy.

Cui Miao
Tao Chang
Meihan Wu
Hongbin Xu
Chun Li
Ming Li
Xiaodong Wang

IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision


ROVER: Recursive Reasoning Over Videos with Vision-Language Models for Embodied Tasks

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across diverse image understanding tasks, but still struggle in settings that require reasoning over extended sequences of camera frames from a video. This limits their utility in embodied settings, which require reasoning over long frame sequences from a continuous stream of visual input at each moment of a task attempt. To address this limitation, we propose ROVER (Reasoning Over VidEo Recursively), a framework that enables the model to recursively decompose long-horizon video trajectories into segments corresponding to shorter subtasks within the trajectory. In doing so, ROVER facilitates more focused and accurate reasoning over temporally localized frame sequences without losing global context. We evaluate ROVER, implemented using an in-context learning approach, on diverse OpenX Embodiment videos and on a new dataset derived from RoboCasa that consists of 543 videos showing both expert and perturbed non-expert trajectories across 27 robotic manipulation tasks. ROVER outperforms strong baselines across three video reasoning tasks: task progress estimation, frame-level natural language reasoning, and video question answering. We observe that, by reducing the number of frames the model reasons over at each timestep, ROVER mitigates hallucinations, especially during unexpected or non-optimal moments of a trajectory. In addition, by enabling the implementation of a subtask-specific sliding context window, ROVER's time complexity scales linearly with video length, an asymptotic improvement over baselines. Demos, code, and data available at: https://rover-vlm.github.io

Philip Schroeder
Ondrej Biza
Thomas Weng
Hongyin Luo
James Glass


CLASS: Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision for Robot Manipulation

Abstract: Recent advances in Behavior Cloning (BC) have led to strong performance in robotic manipulation, driven by expressive models, sequence modeling of actions, and large-scale demonstration data. However, BC faces significant challenges when applied to heterogeneous datasets, such as visual shift with different camera poses or object appearances, where performance degrades despite the benefits of learning at scale. This stems from BC's tendency to overfit individual demonstrations rather than capture shared structure, limiting generalization. To address this, we introduce Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision (CLASS), a method for learning behavioral representations from demonstrations using supervised contrastive learning. CLASS leverages weak supervision from similar action sequences identified via Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and optimizes a soft InfoNCE loss with similarity-weighted positive pairs. We evaluate CLASS on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 real-world tasks to achieve competitive results using retrieval-based control with representations only. Most notably, for downstream policy learning under significant visual shifts, Diffusion Policy with CLASS pre-training achieves an average success rate of 75%, while all other baseline methods fail to perform competitively. Project webpage: https://class-robot.github.io.

Sung-Wook Lee
Xuhui Kang
Brandon Yang
Yen-Ling Kuo


villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a popular paradigm for learning robot manipulation policies that can follow language instructions and generalize to novel scenarios. Recent works have begun to explore the incorporation of latent actions, abstract representations of motion between two frames, into VLA pre-training. In this paper, we introduce villa-X, a novel Vision-Language-Latent-Action (ViLLA) framework that advances latent action modeling for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. Our approach improves both how latent actions are learned and how they are incorporated into VLA pre-training. We demonstrate that villa-X can generate latent action plans in a zero-shot fashion, even for unseen embodiments and open-vocabulary symbolic understanding. This capability enables villa-X to achieve superior performance across diverse simulation tasks in SIMPLER and on two real-world robotic setups involving both gripper and dexterous hand manipulation. These results establish villa-X as a principled and scalable paradigm for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. We believe it provides a strong foundation for future research.

Xiaoyu Chen
Hangxing Wei
Pushi Zhang
Chuheng Zhang
Kaixin Wang
Yanjiang Guo
Rushuai Yang
Yucen Wang
Xinquan Xiao
Li Zhao
Jianyu Chen
Jiang Bian


Spec-VLA: Speculative Decoding for Vision-Language-Action Models with Relaxed Acceptance

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made substantial progress by leveraging the robust capabilities of Visual Language Models (VLMs). However, VLMs' significant parameter size and autoregressive (AR) decoding nature impose considerable computational demands on VLA models. While Speculative Decoding (SD) has shown efficacy in accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating efficient drafting and parallel verification, allowing multiple tokens to be generated in one forward pass, its application to VLA models remains unexplored. This work introduces Spec-VLA, an SD framework designed to accelerate VLA models. Due to the difficulty of the action prediction task and the greedy decoding mechanism of the VLA models, the direct application of the advanced SD framework to the VLA prediction task yields a minor speed improvement. To boost the generation speed, we propose an effective mechanism to relax acceptance utilizing the relative distances represented by the action tokens of the VLA model. Empirical results across diverse test scenarios affirm the effectiveness of the Spec-VLA framework, and further analysis substantiates the impact of our proposed strategies, which enhance the acceptance length by 44%, achieving 1.42 times speedup compared with the OpenVLA baseline, without compromising the success rate. The success of the Spec-VLA framework highlights the potential for broader application of speculative execution in VLA prediction scenarios.

Songsheng Wang
Rucheng Yu
Zhihang Yuan
Chao Yu
Feng Gao
Yu Wang
Derek F. Wong


InstructVLA: Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning from Understanding to Manipulation

Abstract: To operate effectively in the real world, robots should integrate multimodal reasoning with precise action generation. However, existing vision-language-action (VLA) models often sacrifice one for the other, narrow their abilities to task-specific manipulation data, and suffer catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained vision-language capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce InstructVLA, an end-to-end VLA model that preserves the flexible reasoning of large vision-language models (VLMs) while delivering leading manipulation performance with the help of embodied reasoning. InstructVLA introduces a novel training paradigm, Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning (VLA-IT), which employs multimodal training with mixture-of-experts adaptation to jointly optimize embodied reasoning and action generation on both standard VLM corpora and a curated 650K-sample VLA-IT dataset. On in-domain SimplerEnv tasks, InstructVLA achieves 33% improvement over SpatialVLA. To evaluate generalization, we introduce SimplerEnv-Instruct, an 80-task benchmark requiring closed-loop control and high-level instruction understanding, where it outperforms a fine-tuned OpenVLA by 96% and an action expert aided by GPT-4o by 29%. Additionally, InstructVLA surpasses baseline VLMs on multimodal tasks and exhibits inference-time scaling by leveraging textual reasoning to boost manipulation performance in both simulated and real-world settings. These results demonstrate InstructVLA's potential for bridging intuitive and steerable human-robot interaction with efficient policy learning.

Shuai Yang
Hao Li
Bin Wang
Yilun Chen
Yang Tian
Tai Wang
Hanqing Wang
Feng Zhao
Yiyi Liao
Jiangmiao Pang


Confidence Calibration in Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Trustworthy robot behavior requires not only high levels of task success but also that the robot can reliably quantify how likely it is to succeed. To this end, we present a first-of-its-kind study of confidence calibration in vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models, which map visual observations and natural language instructions to low-level robot motor commands. We establish a confidence baseline for VLAs, examine how task success relates to calibration error and how calibration evolves over time, and introduce two lightweight techniques to remedy the miscalibration we observe: prompt ensembles and action-wise Platt scaling. Our aim in this study is to begin to develop the tools and conceptual understanding necessary to render VLAs both highly performant and highly trustworthy via reliable uncertainty quantification.


VLA-Touch: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Dual-Level Tactile Feedback

Abstract: Tactile feedback is generally recognized to be crucial for effective interaction with the physical world. However, state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models lack the ability to interpret and use tactile signals, limiting their effectiveness in contact-rich tasks. Incorporating tactile feedback into these systems is challenging due to the absence of large multi-modal datasets. We present VLA-Touch, an approach that enhances generalist robot policies with tactile sensing \emph{without fine-tuning} the base VLA. Our method introduces two key innovations: (1) a pipeline that leverages a pretrained tactile-language model that provides semantic tactile feedback for high-level task planning, and (2) a diffusion-based controller that refines VLA-generated actions with tactile signals for contact-rich manipulation. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our dual-level integration of tactile feedback improves task planning efficiency while enhancing execution precision. Code is open-sourced at \href{https://github.com/jxbi1010/VLA-Touch}{this URL}.

Jianxin Bi
Kevin Yuchen Ma
Ce Hao
Mike Zheng Shou
Harold Soh


ThinkAct: Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Reinforced Visual Latent Planning

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) reasoning tasks require agents to interpret multimodal instructions, perform long-horizon planning, and act adaptively in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically train VLA models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping inputs to actions without explicit reasoning, which hinders their ability to plan over multiple steps or adapt to complex task variations. In this paper, we propose ThinkAct, a dual-system framework that bridges high-level reasoning with low-level action execution via reinforced visual latent planning. ThinkAct trains a multimodal LLM to generate embodied reasoning plans guided by reinforcing action-aligned visual rewards based on goal completion and trajectory consistency. These reasoning plans are compressed into a visual plan latent that conditions a downstream action model for robust action execution on target environments. Extensive experiments on embodied reasoning and robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkAct enables few-shot adaptation, long-horizon planning, and self-correction behaviors in complex embodied AI tasks.

Chi-Pin Huang
Yueh-Hua Wu
Min-Hung Chen
Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Fu-En Yang


EdgeVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a promising approach to address the data scarcity challenge in robotics, enabling the development of generalizable visuomotor control policies. While models like OpenVLA showcase the potential of this paradigm, deploying large-scale VLMs on resource-constrained mobile manipulation systems remains a significant hurdle. This paper introduces Edge VLA (EVLA), a novel approach designed to significantly enhance the inference speed of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. EVLA maintains the representational power of these models while enabling real-time performance on edge devices. We achieve this through two key innovations: 1) Eliminating the autoregressive requirement for end-effector position prediction, leading to a 7x speedup in inference, and 2) Leveraging the efficiency of Small Language Models (SLMs), demonstrating comparable training performance to larger models with significantly reduced computational demands. Our early results demonstrate that EVLA achieves comparable training characteristics to OpenVLA while offering substantial gains in inference speed and memory efficiency. We release our model checkpoints and training \href{https://github.com/kscalelabs/evla }{codebase} to foster further research.

Paweł Budzianowski
Wesley Maa
Matthew Freed
Jingxiang Mo
Winston Hsiao
Aaron Xie
Tomasz Młoduchowski
Viraj Tipnis
Benjamin Bolte


Rethinking the Embodied Gap in Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Holistic Study of Physical and Visual Disparities

Abstract: Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a physically realistic VLN platform supporting humanoid, quadruped, and wheeled robots. For the first time, we systematically evaluate several ego-centric VLN methods in physical robotic settings across different technical pipelines, including classification models for single-step discrete action prediction, a diffusion model for dense waypoint prediction, and a train-free, map-based large language model (LLM) integrated with path planning. Our results reveal significant performance degradation due to limited robot observation space, environmental lighting variations, and physical challenges like collisions and falls. This also exposes locomotion constraints for legged robots in complex environments. VLN-PE is highly extensible, allowing seamless integration of new scenes beyond MP3D, thereby enabling more comprehensive VLN evaluation. Despite the weak generalization of current models in physical deployment, VLN-PE provides a new pathway for improving cross-embodiment's overall adaptability. We hope our findings and tools inspire the community to rethink VLN limitations and advance robust, practical VLN models. The code is available at https://crystalsixone.github.io/vln_pe.github.io/.

Liuyi Wang
Xinyuan Xia
Hui Zhao
Hanqing Wang
Tai Wang
Yilun Chen
Chengju Liu
Qijun Chen
Jiangmiao Pang