Look, Focus, Act: Efficient and Robust Robot Learning via Human Gaze and Foveated Vision Transformers

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong potential for robot learning by following language instructions. However, in practice, language alone is often insufficient to precisely convey human intent. It is difficult to describe which exact object to interact with among similar candidates, where to act on the object, or how the target may change during execution. To address this limitation, we propose Gaze2Act, a novel VLA framework that leverages human gaze as a dynamic and intuitive intent signal for complex interactive manipulation. Gaze2Act first bridges the ego-exo view gap by mapping first-person gaze into the robot's perspective through cross-view semantic matching, producing both an object mask and a gaze point for coarse-to-fine target specification. These cues are then integrated into the policy through perception-level prompting and action-level conditioning, allowing the robot to attend to relevant regions and execute precise interactions under dynamic intent. In a systematic evaluation across seven task categories and 16 real-robot tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, Gaze2Act achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intent accuracy and task success rate. It notably outperforms baselines in object disambiguation, fine-grained interaction, and dynamic intent steering. These results demonstrate that human gaze provides a natural, low-burden, and highly expressive modality for human-in-the-loop VLA control.

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://gazevla.github.io .

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to runtime disturbances that break the temporal alignment among visual observations, robot states, and executed actions. We introduce ActFovea, a plug-and-play safeguarding framework that detects and mitigates such failures without retraining or modifying the underlying VLA policy. ActFovea uses robot kinematics, proprioceptive states, and recent actions to construct action-conditioned foveated regions that retain contact-relevant areas and predicted motion corridors while suppressing task-irrelevant visual content. It detects runtime risks by evaluating whether visual motion and observation freshness remain consistent with geometric, proprioceptive, and action transitions. For recoverable disturbances, ActFovea constructs disturbance-specific candidate observations and accepts a recovery only after verifying the resulting action chunk. When stale or replayed observations make reliable recovery impossible, it invokes a bounded safe-failure procedure. In closed-loop evaluations of $π_0$ across multiple LIBERO suites, ActFovea increases success under localized visual overlays from 49.3% to 90.3%, closing 93.7% of the gap to clean performance. It further improves success under action drift and visual delay by 7.0 and 9.8 percentage points, respectively, while preserving clean-task performance. Under frozen-observation replay, ActFovea triggers timely safe failure in all trials, with no unprotected failures. These results demonstrate that spatiotemporal visual-action consistency provides an effective basis for runtime safeguarding of VLA policies.