Vision-Language-Action Models

Also known as VLA

Overview

These models combine vision-language backbones with action generators that produce continuous motion or discrete action tokens, often in chunks and with proprioceptive input. They are commonly trained on robot demonstrations, with flow-matching and diffusion policies, reinforcement fine-tuning, and predictive world models used to improve control and planning. Research spans tabletop and bimanual manipulation, mobile and aerial navigation, autonomous driving, and humanoid control, evaluated on benchmarks such as LIBERO, CALVIN, RoboTwin, and driving simulators. A central challenge is making broad visual and language competence translate into reliable closed-loop behavior under new objects, viewpoints, embodiments, delays, and safety constraints; benchmark success can still conceal weak instruction grounding and sim-to-real failures.

Latest papers

CardsList

1,154 papers249 papers in the last four weeks, up 144% on the four weeks before. 1.5% of all new papers.

  1. Frequency-Conditioned Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 9, 2026Haochen Niu, Shengye Dong, Hao Liu +2Flow MatchingRobot Motion Generation

  2. RoboDrop: Curating VLA Post-Training Data via Local Gradient Compatibility

    Sep 9, 2026Runze Xu, Yuanfan Xu, Cuijie Xu +4Robotic Data CollectionTraining Data Selection

  3. DeCAL: Towards Physically-Grounded Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Models via Contact-Aware Latent Co-Imagination

    Sep 8, 2026Yankai Fu, Ning Chen, Junkai Zhao +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationVisuo-Tactile Representation Learning

  4. ComVLA: Communication-Aware Split Inference for VLA Models in 6G-Connected Robotics

    Sep 7, 2026Boliang Liu, Wint Yi Poe, Jingyun Di +2Efficient VLA Model InferenceEfficient VLA Models

  5. ICI-VLA: In-Context Imitation with Spatiotemporally Aligned Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 7, 2026Songhua Yang, Ziyu Liu, Xuetao Li +3Imitation LearningRobotic Manipulation

  6. Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

    Sep 7, 2026Ayoub Kirouane, Georgios Giaples, Christos PetrocheilosVision-Language-Action ModelsCross-Lingual Transfer

  7. GIFT: Goal-Injected Fine-Tuning for Efficient Manipulation Policy Adaptation

    Sep 7, 2026Xiaoyuan Fang, Shuo Feng, Yuxuan Wang +3Vision-Language-Action ModelsEfficient VLA Models

  8. Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Models

    Sep 6, 2026Yijie Zhu, Zitong Yu, Wei Li +4World Action ModelsAction-Conditioned World Models

  9. RefGuard: Identity-Aware Language-Guided Robot Manipulation via Joint Target-Anchor-Frame Grounding

    Sep 5, 2026Lan Wei, Kangyi Lu, Yongchen Wang +5Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationVision-Language Grounding

  10. Where Success Breaks: Failure-Boundary Learning for Robust Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 5, 2026Yanzhe Chen, Zhijun Cao, Mike Zheng ShouVision-Language-Action ModelsRobustness of VLA Models

  11. LayerRoute: Action-Conditioned Mixture-of-Layers Routing for Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Sep 5, 2026Zirui Song, Zheng Lu, Haoran Liao +10Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

  12. CR-VLA-Force: Learning Control-aware Compliance VLA Model for Robust Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 5, 2026Zhaohong Mai, Chao Wang, Chao Zeng +4Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

  13. Towards Neuro-Symbolic Procedural Reasoning for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    Sep 4, 2026Vivek Chavan, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann +2Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  14. Reasoning Without Inference Cost: Latent Semantic Scaffolding for Robot VLA Policies

    Sep 4, 2026Andrew Ting Yan Li, Zhuo Li, Zhelin Yang +3Reasoning for VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

  15. VLA-Precision: Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping for Efficient Real-World Online RL of Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 3, 2026Chenyu Su, Zhaolong Shen, Yuan Qian +8Efficient VLA ModelsLaboratory Automation

  16. Adaptive Vision-Language Grasping via Composable Foundation Priors and Generalizable Grasp Synthesis

    Sep 3, 2026Sixu Yan, Shikang Wang, Binhua Huang +11Robotic GraspingGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  17. Continuous Actions from Discrete Minds: Latent-Aligned Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    Sep 3, 2026Ruoyu Yao, Yusen Xie, Qingzhao Liu +5Latent Action LearningEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

  18. WISE: World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 3, 2026Chenhao Zhang, Hanyu Zhao, Hang Cheng +2Robot Skill LearningWorld Models for Robotics

  19. HINT: Human-Intent Inception for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation

    Sep 2, 2026Mingyu Mei, Haojie Xu, Shihao Jin +9Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  20. Latent Cluster Analysis for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 2, 2026Theodor Wulff, Sergio Lanza, Tamara Bila +3Vision-Language-Action ModelsClustering

  21. ZETA: A Controlled Study of Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment VLA Transfer for Tabletop Manipulation

    Sep 2, 2026Mi Yan, Wenhao Zhang, Zhiqi Zhang +14Cross-Embodiment TransferVision-Language-Action Models

  22. ShieldVLA: Feasibility-Aware Safety Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 2, 2026Manan Tayal, Akshay NambiVision-Language-Action ModelsSafe RL

  23. Towards Zero-Shot Transfer Across Embodiments For Driving VLAs

    Sep 2, 2026Caio Azevedo, Stefano Sabatini, Sascha Hornauer +1Autonomous DrivingVision-Language-Action Models

  24. SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 2, 2026Cheng Yin, Wang Xu, Junpeng Yang +8Vision-Language-Action ModelsMemory-Augmented VLMs