FocusVLA: Future-Intent Guided Dynamic View Routing for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, in which reliable action prediction critically depends on accurately interpreting and integrating visual observations conditioned on language instructions. Although recent works have sought to enhance the visual capabilities of VLA models, most approaches treat the LLM backbone as a black box, providing limited insight into how visual information is grounded into action generation. Therefore, we perform a systematic analysis of multiple VLA models across different action-generation paradigms and observe that sensitivity to visual tokens progressively decreases in deeper layers during action generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DeepVision-VLA, built on a Vision-Language Mixture-of-Transformers (VL-MoT) framework. This framework enables shared attention between the vision foundation model and the VLA backbone, injecting multi-level visual features from the vision expert into deeper layers of the VLA backbone to enhance visual representations for precise and complex manipulation. In addition, we introduce Action-Guided Visual Pruning (AGVP), which leverages shallow-layer attention to prune irrelevant visual tokens while preserving task-relevant ones, reinforcing critical visual cues for manipulation with minimal computational overhead. DeepVision-VLA outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by 9.0% and 7.5% on simulated and real-world tasks, respectively, providing new insights for the design of visually enhanced VLA models.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models improve action generation by conditioning policies on rich vision-language information. However, current auto-regressive policies are constrained by three bottlenecks: (1) architectural bias drives models to overlook visual details, (2) an excessive number of visual tokens makes attention difficult to focus on the correct regions, and (3) task-irrelevant visual information introduces substantial noise - together severely impairing the quality of action. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively utilize different visual representations for action generation. To this end, we first empirically validate the above issues and show that VLA performance is primarily limited by how visual information is utilized, rather than by the quality of visual representations. Based on these insights, we introduce FocusVLA, a novel paradigm that directs the model's attention to task-relevant visual regions to effectively bridge vision to action. Specifically, we first propose Modality Cascaded Attention to eliminate shortcut pathways, thereby compelling VLA models to rely on task-relevant visual details for action generation. Furthermore, we propose Focus Attention, which dynamically selects task-relevant visual patches to control information quantity while explicitly modulating their influence to suppress task-irrelevant noise. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks demonstrate that FocusVLA not only effectively leverages visual details to perform dexterous manipulations, but also substantially improves performance and accelerates convergence across a variety of tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation, but many existing methods still rely on direct mappings from language and visual observations to dense actions. This formulation can weaken the semantic reasoning capability inherited from pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which are mainly optimized for visual-linguistic understanding rather than low-level control, and becomes fragile under spatial variations, including changes in object positions, scene layouts, robot embodiments, and camera viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose H-VLA, a hierarchical VLA framework that decouples high-level key-action reasoning from low-level motion generation. H-VLA combines a Key-Action Model for predicting a key-action as the next manipulation subgoal, a Motion Planning Model for generating dense future actions conditioned on the predicted key-action, and a Unified Camera-Centric Action Space for consistent representation across datasets, embodiments, and viewpoints. We further adopt a two-stage training strategy that emphasizes key-action reasoning during pre-training and dense motion generation during fine-tuning. Experiments show that H-VLA achieves strong performance on SimplerEnv, reaching 91% on Google Robot visual matching, 84% on Google Robot variant aggregation, and 81% on WidowX visual matching. On Agilex real-robot tasks, H-VLA improves over the strongest baseline by 10, 47, and 16 percentage points under in-distribution, out-of-distribution position, and out-of-distribution scene/object settings, respectively.