Daily Papers

Discrete motion tokenization has recently enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as versatile backbones for motion understanding and motion-language reasoning. However, existing pipelines typically decouple motion quantization from semantic embedding learning, linking them solely via token IDs. This approach fails to effectively align the intrinsic geometry of the motion space with the embedding space, thereby hindering the LLM's capacity for nuanced motion reasoning. We argue that alignment is most effective when both modalities share a unified geometric basis. Therefore, instead of forcing the LLM to reconstruct the complex geometry among motion tokens from scratch, we present a novel framework that explicitly enforces orthogonality on both the motion codebook and the LLM embedding space, ensuring that their relational structures naturally mirror each other. Specifically, we employ a decoder-only quantizer with Gumbel-Softmax for differentiable training and balanced codebook usage. To bridge the modalities, we use a sparse projection that maps motion codes into the LLM embedding space while preserving orthogonality. Finally, a two-stage orthonormal regularization schedule enforces soft constraints during tokenizer training and LLM fine-tuning to maintain geometric alignment without hindering semantic adaptation. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D demonstrate that our framework achieves a 20% performance improvement over current state-of-the-art methods, validating that a unified geometric basis effectively empowers the LLM for nuanced motion reasoning.

Language models uncover unprecedented abilities in analyzing driving scenarios, owing to their limitless knowledge accumulated from text-based pre-training. Naturally, they should particularly excel in analyzing rule-based interactions, such as those triggered by traffic laws, which are well documented in texts. However, such interaction analysis remains underexplored due to the lack of dedicated language datasets that address it. Therefore, we propose Waymo Open Motion Dataset-Reasoning (WOMD-Reasoning), a comprehensive large-scale Q&As dataset built on WOMD focusing on describing and reasoning traffic rule-induced interactions in driving scenarios. WOMD-Reasoning also presents by far the largest multi-modal Q&A dataset, with 3 million Q&As on real-world driving scenarios, covering a wide range of driving topics from map descriptions and motion status descriptions to narratives and analyses of agents' interactions, behaviors, and intentions. To showcase the applications of WOMD-Reasoning, we design Motion-LLaVA, a motion-language model fine-tuned on WOMD-Reasoning. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are performed on WOMD-Reasoning dataset as well as the outputs of Motion-LLaVA, supporting the data quality and wide applications of WOMD-Reasoning, in interaction predictions, traffic rule compliance plannings, etc. The dataset and its vision modal extension are available on https://waymo.com/open/download/. The codes & prompts to build it are available on https://github.com/yhli123/WOMD-Reasoning.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on standard video tasks but struggle with physics-driven reasoning involving motion dynamics and spatial interactions. This limitation reduces their ability to interpret real or AI-generated content (AIGC) videos and to generate physically consistent content. We present an approach that addresses this gap by translating physical-world context cues into interpretable representations aligned with VLMs' perception, comprehension, and reasoning. We introduce MASS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 4,350 real-world and AIGC videos and 8,361 free-form video question-answering pairs focused on physics-related comprehension tasks, with detailed annotations including visual detections, sub-segment grounding, and full-sequence 3D motion tracking of entities. We further present MASS, a model-agnostic method that injects spatial-temporal signals into the VLM language space via depth-based 3D encoding and visual grounding, coupled with a motion tracker for object dynamics. To strengthen cross-modal alignment and reasoning, we apply reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments and ablations show that our refined VLMs outperform comparable and larger baselines, as well as prior state-of-the-art models, by 8.7% and 6.0%, achieving performance comparable to close-source SoTA VLMs such as Gemini-2.5-Flash on physics reasoning and comprehension. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Mechanical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, defined by its ubiquitous yet irreplaceable role in human activities ranging from routine tasks to civil engineering. Embedding machines with mechanical reasoning is therefore an important step towards building human-level artificial intelligence. Here, we leveraged 155 cognitive experiments to test the understanding of system stability, gears and pulley systems, leverage principle, inertia and motion, and fluid mechanics in 26 Vision Language Models (VLMs). Results indicate that VLMs consistently perform worse than humans on all domains, while demonstrate significant difficulty in reasoning about gear systems and fluid mechanics. Notably, their performance on these tasks do not improve as number of parameters increase, suggesting that current attention-based architecture may fail to grasp certain underlying mechanisms required for mechanical reasoning, particularly those pertaining to mental simulations.

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) grow in sophistication, their ability to perform reasoning is coming under increasing supervision. While they excel at many tasks, their grasp of fundamental scientific principles, such as physics, remains an underexplored frontier. To reflect the advancements in these capabilities, we introduce a novel and accessible framework designed to rigorously evaluate VLMs on their understanding of 2D physics. Our framework features a pragmatic scenario generator that creates a diverse testbed of over 400 problems across four core domains: Projectile Motion, Collision Dynamics, Mechanics, and Fluid Dynamics. Through comprehensive evaluation of four state-of-the-art VLMs, we demonstrate a strong correlation between model scale and reasoning ability, with our top-performing model, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, achieving an overall score of 0.815. We find that while models excel at formulaic problems, they struggle significantly with domains requiring abstract spatial reasoning. By designing this framework, we aim to democratize the study of scientific reasoning in VLMs and foster deeper insights into their capabilities and limitations.

Integrating visual-language instructions into visuomotor policies is gaining momentum in robot learning for enhancing open-world generalization. Despite promising advances, existing approaches face two challenges: limited language steerability when no generated reasoning is used as a condition, or significant inference latency when reasoning is incorporated. In this work, we introduce MoTVLA, a mixture-of-transformers (MoT)-based vision-language-action (VLA) model that integrates fast-slow unified reasoning with behavior policy learning. MoTVLA preserves the general intelligence of pre-trained VLMs (serving as the generalist) for tasks such as perception, scene understanding, and semantic planning, while incorporating a domain expert, a second transformer that shares knowledge with the pretrained VLM, to generate domain-specific fast reasoning (e.g., robot motion decomposition), thereby improving policy execution efficiency. By conditioning the action expert on decomposed motion instructions, MoTVLA can learn diverse behaviors and substantially improve language steerability. Extensive evaluations across natural language processing benchmarks, robotic simulation environments, and real-world experiments confirm the superiority of MoTVLA in both fast-slow reasoning and manipulation task performance.

Vehicle motion planning is an essential component of autonomous driving technology. Current rule-based vehicle motion planning methods perform satisfactorily in common scenarios but struggle to generalize to long-tailed situations. Meanwhile, learning-based methods have yet to achieve superior performance over rule-based approaches in large-scale closed-loop scenarios. To address these issues, we propose PlanAgent, the first mid-to-mid planning system based on a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). MLLM is used as a cognitive agent to introduce human-like knowledge, interpretability, and common-sense reasoning into the closed-loop planning. Specifically, PlanAgent leverages the power of MLLM through three core modules. First, an Environment Transformation module constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) map and a lane-graph-based textual description from the environment as inputs. Second, a Reasoning Engine module introduces a hierarchical chain-of-thought from scene understanding to lateral and longitudinal motion instructions, culminating in planner code generation. Last, a Reflection module is integrated to simulate and evaluate the generated planner for reducing MLLM's uncertainty. PlanAgent is endowed with the common-sense reasoning and generalization capability of MLLM, which empowers it to effectively tackle both common and complex long-tailed scenarios. Our proposed PlanAgent is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging nuPlan benchmarks. A comprehensive set of experiments convincingly demonstrates that PlanAgent outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in the closed-loop motion planning task. Codes will be soon released.

Personalized driving refers to an autonomous vehicle's ability to adapt its driving behavior or control strategies to match individual users' preferences and driving styles while maintaining safety and comfort standards. However, existing works either fail to capture every individual preference precisely or become computationally inefficient as the user base expands. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising solutions to this front through their natural language understanding and scene reasoning capabilities. In this work, we propose a lightweight yet effective on-board VLM framework that provides low-latency personalized driving performance while maintaining strong reasoning capabilities. Our solution incorporates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based memory module that enables continuous learning of individual driving preferences through human feedback. Through comprehensive real-world vehicle deployment and experiments, our system has demonstrated the ability to provide safe, comfortable, and personalized driving experiences across various scenarios and significantly reduce takeover rates by up to 76.9%. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first end-to-end VLM-based motion control system in real-world autonomous vehicles.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a ''think-while-acting'' paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.

Current state-of-the-art paradigms predominantly treat Text-to-Motion (T2M) generation as a direct translation problem, mapping symbolic language directly to continuous poses. While effective for simple actions, this System 1 approach faces a fundamental theoretical bottleneck we identify as the Semantic-Kinematic Impedance Mismatch: the inherent difficulty of grounding semantically dense, discrete linguistic intent into kinematically dense, high-frequency motion data in a single shot. In this paper, we argue that the solution lies in an architectural shift towards Latent System 2 Reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Hierarchical Motor Control in cognitive science, we propose Latent Motion Reasoning (LMR) that reformulates generation as a two-stage Think-then-Act decision process. Central to LMR is a novel Dual-Granularity Tokenizer that disentangles motion into two distinct manifolds: a compressed, semantically rich Reasoning Latent for planning global topology, and a high-frequency Execution Latent for preserving physical fidelity. By forcing the model to autoregressively reason (plan the coarse trajectory) before it moves (instantiates the frames), we effectively bridge the ineffability gap between language and physics. We demonstrate LMR's versatility by implementing it for two representative baselines: T2M-GPT (discrete) and MotionStreamer (continuous). Extensive experiments show that LMR yields non-trivial improvements in both semantic alignment and physical plausibility, validating that the optimal substrate for motion planning is not natural language, but a learned, motion-aligned concept space. Codes and demos can be found in https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/}

Accurate spatial reasoning in outdoor environments - covering geometry, object pose, and inter-object relationships - is fundamental to downstream tasks such as mapping, motion forecasting, and high-level planning in autonomous driving. We introduce SURDS, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). Built on the nuScenes dataset, SURDS comprises 41,080 vision-question-answer training instances and 9,250 evaluation samples, spanning six spatial categories: orientation, depth estimation, pixel-level localization, pairwise distance, lateral ordering, and front-behind relations. We benchmark leading general-purpose VLMs, including GPT, Gemini, and Qwen, revealing persistent limitations in fine-grained spatial understanding. To address these deficiencies, we go beyond static evaluation and explore whether alignment techniques can improve spatial reasoning performance. Specifically, we propose a reinforcement learning-based alignment scheme leveraging spatially grounded reward signals - capturing both perception-level accuracy (location) and reasoning consistency (logic). We further incorporate final-answer correctness and output-format rewards to guide fine-grained policy adaptation. Our GRPO-aligned variant achieves an overall score of 40.80 in the SURDS benchmark. Notably, it outperforms proprietary systems such as GPT-4o (13.30) and Gemini-2.0-flash (35.71). To our best knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that reinforcement learning-based alignment can significantly and consistently enhance the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs in real-world driving contexts. We release the SURDS benchmark, evaluation toolkit, and GRPO alignment code through: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/Drive-MLLM.

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA's failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models.

Multi-object rearrangement is a crucial skill for service robots, and commonsense reasoning is frequently needed in this process. However, achieving commonsense arrangements requires knowledge about objects, which is hard to transfer to robots. Large language models (LLMs) are one potential source of this knowledge, but they do not naively capture information about plausible physical arrangements of the world. We propose LLM-GROP, which uses prompting to extract commonsense knowledge about semantically valid object configurations from an LLM and instantiates them with a task and motion planner in order to generalize to varying scene geometry. LLM-GROP allows us to go from natural-language commands to human-aligned object rearrangement in varied environments. Based on human evaluations, our approach achieves the highest rating while outperforming competitive baselines in terms of success rate while maintaining comparable cumulative action costs. Finally, we demonstrate a practical implementation of LLM-GROP on a mobile manipulator in real-world scenarios. Supplementary materials are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/llm-grop

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving motion planning has recently emerged as a promising direction, offering enhanced interpretability, better controllability, and improved generalization in rare and long-tail scenarios. However, existing methods often rely on abstracted perception or map-based inputs, missing crucial visual context, such as fine-grained road cues, accident aftermath, or unexpected obstacles, which are essential for robust decision-making in complex driving environments. To bridge this gap, we propose VLMPlanner, a hybrid framework that combines a learning-based real-time planner with a vision-language model (VLM) capable of reasoning over raw images. The VLM processes multi-view images to capture rich, detailed visual information and leverages its common-sense reasoning capabilities to guide the real-time planner in generating robust and safe trajectories. Furthermore, we develop the Context-Adaptive Inference Gate (CAI-Gate) mechanism that enables the VLM to mimic human driving behavior by dynamically adjusting its inference frequency based on scene complexity, thereby achieving an optimal balance between planning performance and computational efficiency. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale, challenging nuPlan benchmark, with comprehensive experimental results demonstrating superior planning performance in scenarios with intricate road conditions and dynamic elements. Code will be available.

Effective human-agent collaboration in physical environments requires understanding not only what to act upon, but also where the actionable elements are and how to interact with them. Existing approaches often operate at the object level or disjointedly handle fine-grained affordance reasoning, lacking coherent, instruction-driven grounding and reasoning. In this work, we introduce a new task: Fine-grained 3D Embodied Reasoning, which requires an agent to predict, for each referenced affordance element in a 3D scene, a structured triplet comprising its spatial location, motion type, and motion axis, based on a task instruction. To solve this task, we propose AffordBot, a novel framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with a tailored chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning paradigm. To bridge the gap between 3D input and 2D-compatible MLLMs, we render surround-view images of the scene and project 3D element candidates into these views, forming a rich visual representation aligned with the scene geometry. Our CoT pipeline begins with an active perception stage, prompting the MLLM to select the most informative viewpoint based on the instruction, before proceeding with step-by-step reasoning to localize affordance elements and infer plausible interaction motions. Evaluated on the SceneFun3D dataset, AffordBot achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong generalization and physically grounded reasoning with only 3D point cloud input and MLLMs.

Spatio-temporal reasoning is essential in understanding real-world environments in various fields, eg, autonomous driving and sports analytics. Recent advances have improved the spatial reasoning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by introducing large-scale data, but these models still struggle to analyze kinematic elements like traveled distance and speed of moving objects. To bridge this gap, we construct a spatio-temporal reasoning dataset and benchmark involving kinematic instruction tuning, referred to as STKit and STKit-Bench. They consist of real-world videos with 3D annotations, detailing object motion dynamics: traveled distance, speed, movement direction, inter-object distance comparisons, and relative movement direction. To further scale such data construction to videos without 3D labels, we propose an automatic pipeline to generate pseudo-labels using 4D reconstruction in real-world scale. With our kinematic instruction tuning data for spatio-temporal reasoning, we present ST-VLM, a VLM enhanced for spatio-temporal reasoning, which exhibits outstanding performance on STKit-Bench. Furthermore, we show that ST-VLM generalizes robustly across diverse domains and tasks, outperforming baselines on other spatio-temporal benchmarks (eg, ActivityNet, TVQA+). Finally, by integrating learned spatio-temporal reasoning with existing abilities, ST-VLM enables complex multi-step reasoning. Project page: https://ikodoh.github.io/ST-VLM.

Enhancing the spatial perception capabilities of mobile robots is crucial for achieving embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Although significant progress has been made in simulated environments, directly transferring these capabilities to real-world scenarios often results in severe hallucination phenomena, causing robots to lose effective spatial awareness. To address this issue, we propose BrainNav, a bio-inspired spatial cognitive navigation framework inspired by biological spatial cognition theories and cognitive map theory. BrainNav integrates dual-map (coordinate map and topological map) and dual-orientation (relative orientation and absolute orientation) strategies, enabling real-time navigation through dynamic scene capture and path planning. Its five core modules-Hippocampal Memory Hub, Visual Cortex Perception Engine, Parietal Spatial Constructor, Prefrontal Decision Center, and Cerebellar Motion Execution Unit-mimic biological cognitive functions to reduce spatial hallucinations and enhance adaptability. Validated in a zero-shot real-world lab environment using the Limo Pro robot, BrainNav, compatible with GPT-4, outperforms existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) methods without fine-tuning.

Reasoning about motion and space is a fundamental cognitive capability that is required by multiple real-world applications. While many studies highlight that large multimodal language models (MLMs) struggle to reason about space, they only focus on static spatial relationships, and not dynamic awareness of motion and space, i.e., reasoning about the effect of egocentric and object motions on spatial relationships. Manually annotating such object and camera movements is expensive. Hence, we introduce SAT, a simulated spatial aptitude training dataset comprising both static and dynamic spatial reasoning across 175K question-answer (QA) pairs and 20K scenes. Complementing this, we also construct a small (150 image-QAs) yet challenging dynamic spatial test set using real-world images. Leveraging our SAT datasets and 6 existing static spatial benchmarks, we systematically investigate what improves both static and dynamic spatial awareness. Our results reveal that simulations are surprisingly effective at imparting spatial aptitude to MLMs that translate to real images. We show that perfect annotations in simulation are more effective than existing approaches of pseudo-annotating real images. For instance, SAT training improves a LLaVA-13B model by an average 11% and a LLaVA-Video-7B model by an average 8% on multiple spatial benchmarks, including our real-image dynamic test set and spatial reasoning on long videos -- even outperforming some large proprietary models. While reasoning over static relationships improves with synthetic training data, there is still considerable room for improvement for dynamic reasoning questions.

As video large language models (Video-LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications that demand grounded multimodal reasoning, ensuring their factual consistency and reliability is of critical importance. However, sycophancy, the tendency of these models to align with user input even when it contradicts the visual evidence, undermines their trustworthiness in such contexts. Current sycophancy research has largely overlooked its specific manifestations in the video-language domain, resulting in a notable absence of systematic benchmarks and targeted evaluations to understand how Video-LLMs respond under misleading user input. To fill this gap, we propose VISE (Video-LLM Sycophancy Benchmarking and Evaluation), the first benchmark designed to evaluate sycophantic behavior in state-of-the-art Video-LLMs across diverse question formats, prompt biases, and visual reasoning tasks. Specifically, VISE pioneeringly brings linguistic perspectives on sycophancy into the video domain, enabling fine-grained analysis across multiple sycophancy types and interaction patterns. Furthermore, we propose two potential training-free mitigation strategies, revealing potential paths for reducing sycophantic bias: (i) enhancing visual grounding through interpretable key-frame selection and (ii) steering model behavior away from sycophancy via targeted, inference-time intervention on its internal neural representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/William030422/Video-Sycophancy.

Understanding the physical world - governed by laws of motion, spatial relations, and causality - poses a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While recent advances such as OpenAI o3 and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive perceptual and reasoning capabilities, our investigation reveals these models struggle profoundly with visual physical reasoning, failing to grasp basic physical laws, spatial interactions, and causal effects in complex scenes. More importantly, they often fail to follow coherent reasoning chains grounded in visual evidence, especially when multiple steps are needed to arrive at the correct answer. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we introduce MVPBench, a curated benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate visual physical reasoning through the lens of visual chain-of-thought (CoT). Each example features interleaved multi-image inputs and demands not only the correct final answer but also a coherent, step-by-step reasoning path grounded in evolving visual cues. This setup mirrors how humans reason through real-world physical processes over time. To ensure fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a graph-based CoT consistency metric that verifies whether the reasoning path of model adheres to valid physical logic. Additionally, we minimize shortcut exploitation from text priors, encouraging models to rely on visual understanding. Experimental results reveal a concerning trend: even cutting-edge MLLMs exhibit poor visual reasoning accuracy and weak image-text alignment in physical domains. Surprisingly, RL-based post-training alignment - commonly believed to improve visual reasoning performance - often harms spatial reasoning, suggesting a need to rethink current fine-tuning practices.

Autonomous driving is a complex and challenging task that aims at safe motion planning through scene understanding and reasoning. While vision-only autonomous driving methods have recently achieved notable performance, through enhanced scene understanding, several key issues, including lack of reasoning, low generalization performance and long-tail scenarios, still need to be addressed. In this paper, we present VLP, a novel Vision-Language-Planning framework that exploits language models to bridge the gap between linguistic understanding and autonomous driving. VLP enhances autonomous driving systems by strengthening both the source memory foundation and the self-driving car's contextual understanding. VLP achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end planning performance on the challenging NuScenes dataset by achieving 35.9\% and 60.5\% reduction in terms of average L2 error and collision rates, respectively, compared to the previous best method. Moreover, VLP shows improved performance in challenging long-tail scenarios and strong generalization capabilities when faced with new urban environments.

Spatial reasoning in 3D space is central to human cognition and indispensable for embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) struggle frequently with tasks as simple as anticipating how a scene will look after an egocentric motion: they perceive 2D images but lack an internal model of 3D dynamics. We therefore propose MindJourney, a test-time scaling framework that grants a VLM with this missing capability by coupling it to a controllable world model based on video diffusion. The VLM iteratively sketches a concise camera trajectory, while the world model synthesizes the corresponding view at each step. The VLM then reasons over this multi-view evidence gathered during the interactive exploration. Without any fine-tuning, our MindJourney achieves over an average 8% performance boost on the representative spatial reasoning benchmark SAT, showing that pairing VLMs with world models for test-time scaling offers a simple, plug-and-play route to robust 3D reasoning. Meanwhile, our method also improves upon the test-time inference VLMs trained through reinforcement learning, which demonstrates the potential of our method that utilizes world models for test-time scaling.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to learn semantic action representations from large-scale unannotated data. Yet, we identify two bottlenecks of LAMs: 1) the commonly adopted end-to-end trained image encoder suffers from poor spatial understanding; 2) LAMs can be fragile when input frames are distant, leading to limited temporal perception. Such factors inevitably hinder stable and clear action modeling. To this end, we propose Farsighted-LAM, a latent action framework with geometry-aware spatial encoding and multi-scale temporal modeling, capturing structural priors and dynamic motion patterns from consecutive frames. We further propose SSM-VLA, an end-to-end VLA framework built upon Farsighted-LAM, which integrates structured perception with a visual Chain-of-Thought module to explicitly reason about environmental dynamics, enhancing decision consistency and interpretability. We validate SSM-VLA on multiple VLA tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our strategy of combining geometry-aware modeling, temporal coherence, and explicit reasoning is effective in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied intelligence.

Human-level driving is an ultimate goal of autonomous driving. Conventional approaches formulate autonomous driving as a perception-prediction-planning framework, yet their systems do not capitalize on the inherent reasoning ability and experiential knowledge of humans. In this paper, we propose a fundamental paradigm shift from current pipelines, exploiting Large Language Models (LLMs) as a cognitive agent to integrate human-like intelligence into autonomous driving systems. Our approach, termed Agent-Driver, transforms the traditional autonomous driving pipeline by introducing a versatile tool library accessible via function calls, a cognitive memory of common sense and experiential knowledge for decision-making, and a reasoning engine capable of chain-of-thought reasoning, task planning, motion planning, and self-reflection. Powered by LLMs, our Agent-Driver is endowed with intuitive common sense and robust reasoning capabilities, thus enabling a more nuanced, human-like approach to autonomous driving. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments substantiate that our Agent-Driver significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art driving methods by a large margin. Our approach also demonstrates superior interpretability and few-shot learning ability to these methods. Code will be released.

In the pursuit of fully autonomous robotic systems capable of taking over tasks traditionally performed by humans, the complexity of open-world environments poses a considerable challenge. Addressing this imperative, this study contributes to the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to task and motion planning for robots. We propose a system architecture that orchestrates a seamless interplay between multiple cognitive levels, encompassing reasoning, planning, and motion generation. At its core lies a novel replanning strategy that handles physically grounded, logical, and semantic errors in the generated plans. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed feedback architecture, particularly its impact on executability, correctness, and time complexity via empirical evaluation in the context of a simulation and two intricate real-world scenarios: blocks world, barman and pizza preparation.

Motion understanding is fundamental to physical reasoning, enabling models to infer dynamics and predict future states. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle on recent motion benchmarks, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, fine-grained motion datasets. Existing motion datasets are often constructed from costly manual annotation, severely limiting scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce FoundationMotion, a fully automated data curation pipeline that constructs large-scale motion datasets. Our approach first detects and tracks objects in videos to extract their trajectories, then leverages these trajectories and video frames with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate fine-grained captions and diverse question-answer pairs about motion and spatial reasoning. Using datasets produced by this pipeline, we fine-tune open-source models including NVILA-Video-15B and Qwen2.5-7B, achieving substantial improvements in motion understanding without compromising performance on other tasks. Notably, our models outperform strong closed-source baselines like Gemini-2.5 Flash and large open-source models such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B across diverse motion understanding datasets and benchmarks. FoundationMotion thus provides a scalable solution for curating fine-grained motion datasets that enable effective fine-tuning of diverse models to enhance motion understanding and spatial reasoning capabilities.

Free-form gesture understanding is highly appealing for human-computer interaction, as it liberates users from the constraints of predefined gesture categories. However, the sole existing solution GestureGPT suffers from limited recognition accuracy and slow response times. In this paper, we propose Gestura, an end-to-end system for free-form gesture understanding. Gestura harnesses a pre-trained Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to align the highly dynamic and diverse patterns of free-form gestures with high-level semantic concepts. To better capture subtle hand movements across different styles, we introduce a Landmark Processing Module that compensate for LVLMs' lack of fine-grained domain knowledge by embedding anatomical hand priors. Further, a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning strategy enables step-by-step semantic inference, transforming shallow knowledge into deep semantic understanding and significantly enhancing the model's ability to interpret ambiguous or unconventional gestures. Together, these components allow Gestura to achieve robust and adaptable free-form gesture comprehension. Additionally, we have developed the first open-source dataset for free-form gesture intention reasoning and understanding with over 300,000 annotated QA pairs.

Previous studies on robotic manipulation are based on a limited understanding of the underlying 3D motion constraints and affordances. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive paradigm, termed UniAff, that integrates 3D object-centric manipulation and task understanding in a unified formulation. Specifically, we constructed a dataset labeled with manipulation-related key attributes, comprising 900 articulated objects from 19 categories and 600 tools from 12 categories. Furthermore, we leverage MLLMs to infer object-centric representations for manipulation tasks, including affordance recognition and reasoning about 3D motion constraints. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings indicate that UniAff significantly improves the generalization of robotic manipulation for tools and articulated objects. We hope that UniAff will serve as a general baseline for unified robotic manipulation tasks in the future. Images, videos, dataset, and code are published on the project website at:https://sites.google.com/view/uni-aff/home

Reasoning about dynamic spatial relationships is essential, as both observers and objects often move simultaneously. Although vision-language models (VLMs) and visual expertise models excel in 2D tasks and static scenarios, their ability to fully understand dynamic 3D scenarios remains limited. We introduce Dynamic Spatial Intelligence and propose DSI-Bench, a benchmark with nearly 1,000 dynamic videos and over 1,700 manually annotated questions covering nine decoupled motion patterns of observers and objects. Spatially and temporally symmetric designs reduce biases and enable systematic evaluation of models' reasoning about self-motion and object motion. Our evaluation of 14 VLMs and expert models reveals key limitations: models often conflate observer and object motion, exhibit semantic biases, and fail to accurately infer relative relationships in dynamic scenarios. Our DSI-Bench provides valuable findings and insights about the future development of general and expertise models with dynamic spatial intelligence.

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling the generation of highly realistic videos and drawing the attention of the community in their potential as world simulators. However, despite their capabilities, VDMs often fail to produce physically plausible videos due to an inherent lack of understanding of physics, resulting in incorrect dynamics and event sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-stage image-to-video generation framework that explicitly incorporates physics. In the first stage, we employ a Vision Language Model (VLM) as a coarse-grained motion planner, integrating chain-of-thought and physics-aware reasoning to predict a rough motion trajectories/changes that approximate real-world physical dynamics while ensuring the inter-frame consistency. In the second stage, we use the predicted motion trajectories/changes to guide the video generation of a VDM. As the predicted motion trajectories/changes are rough, noise is added during inference to provide freedom to the VDM in generating motion with more fine details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce physically plausible motion, and comparative evaluations highlight the notable superiority of our approach over existing methods. More video results are available on our Project Page: https://madaoer.github.io/projects/physically_plausible_video_generation.

Audio-driven co-speech human gesture generation has made remarkable advancements recently. However, most previous works only focus on single person audio-driven gesture generation. We aim at solving the problem of conversational co-speech gesture generation that considers multiple participants in a conversation, which is a novel and challenging task due to the difficulty of simultaneously incorporating semantic information and other relevant features from both the primary speaker and the interlocutor. To this end, we propose CoDiffuseGesture, a diffusion model-based approach for speech-driven interaction gesture generation via modeling bilateral conversational intention, emotion, and semantic context. Our method synthesizes appropriate interactive, speech-matched, high-quality gestures for conversational motions through the intention perception module and emotion reasoning module at the sentence level by a pretrained language model. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method.