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. StructRL: Structured Action-Space Exploration for Flow-Based VLAs

    Aug 15, 2026Jiarui Yang, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen +4RL for RoboticsRL Exploration

  2. AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Aug 15, 2026An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li +3Vision-Language-Action ModelsEfficient VLA Models

  3. ForceU-VLA: A Force-Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Ultrasound Scanning

    Aug 15, 2026Xingzheng Wu, Cheng Zhang, Guihao Yan +3Robotic UltrasoundVision-Language-Action Models

  4. Imagining Recovery: Inference-Time Counterfactual Realignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 14, 2026Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu, Kai Ye +6Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobustness of VLA Models

  5. Evolve Vision-Language-Action Model into an Agent with On-the-fly Tool-use

    Aug 14, 2026Ding Yi, Yanzhao Yu, Xili Dai +5Robotic Tool UseTool-Using Vision-Language Agents

  6. BICPO-VLA: Behavior-Identified Continuation Preference Optimization for Smooth Asynchronous Vision-Language-Action Control

    Aug 14, 2026Ming Shang, Yuchen Huang, Jiaoyang Chen +8Vision-Language-Action ModelsEfficient VLA Model Inference

  7. Decoding Task Progress from VLA Representations

    Aug 13, 2026Atiksh Bhardwaj, Edward Weiyi Duan, Prithwish Dan +2Vision-Language-Action ModelsReasoning for VLA Models

  8. UniTexture: Cross-Task Universal Adversarial Textures for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 13, 2026Yukun Dai, Mingzhe Dai, Tianshi Wang +3Adversarial Attacks on VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

  9. FlashDrive: Flash Vision-Language-Action Inference for Autonomous Driving

    Aug 13, 2026Zekai Li, Yihao Liang, Hongfei Zhang +3Efficient VLA Model InferenceAutonomous Driving

  10. DreamFly: Causal Memory and Receding-Horizon Diffusion Planning for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

    Aug 12, 2026Yan Deng, Fei XuMemory-Augmented VLMsDiffusion-Based Planning

  11. Neural Introspection Gating for Adaptive KV-Cache Reuse in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 11, 2026Zhijie Wu, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kei OkadaAdaptive InferenceKV Caching

  12. DriveVLA-M0: Failure-Aware Memory Augmentation for Autonomous Driving

    Aug 11, 2026Zebin Xing, Yupeng Zheng, Qiang Chen +10Memory-Augmented VLMsEnd-to-End Autonomous Driving

  13. SLIM-0.5B: Learning Action-Grounded Predictive Latents for Robot Manipulation

    Aug 10, 2026Jingkai Wang, Zihan Tang, Gu Zhang +7Latent Dynamics ModelingLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  14. World Tokens: Enhancing Embodied Policies with Training-Time World Modeling

    Aug 10, 2026Qu Tang, Benhui Zhuang, Bo Yuan +3Efficient VLA Model InferenceEfficient VLA Models

  15. RefineFly: Failure-Aware Post-Training for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

    Aug 10, 2026Boxiong Wang, Hui Kang, Geng Sun +3UAV NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  16. VANE: Reliable Test-Time Training for Vision-Language-Action Models via Future Visual Representation Prediction

    Aug 10, 2026Hongjin Ji, Guoyang Xia, Luoyang Sun +2Robot Policy AdaptationVision-Language-Action Models

  17. Mamba-based Selective State Space Modeling Improves the Accuracy-Complexity Tradeoff of SmolVLA Vision-Language-Action Experts

    Aug 10, 2026Farida Mohsen, Thowayba Elkaffash, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani +3Vision-Language-Action ModelsEfficient VLA Model Inference

  18. JEPA-WAM: Learning Vision-Language-Action Policies with Joint-Embedding World Modeling

    Aug 10, 2026Yihan Lin, Jiawei He, Shifeng Bao +6Joint-Embedding Predictive ArchitectureRobotic Manipulation

  19. GDLAM: Group-Disentangled Latent Action Model for Highly Disentangled Embodied Pretraining

    Aug 10, 2026Jiarui Yang, Jiawei Li, Jiale Zhang +5Latent Action LearningDisentangled Representation Learning

  20. From Recovery to Drop-off: How Action Post-training Reduces a VLM's Late-Layer Depth Decodability

    Aug 9, 2026Alexander Hackett, Arnaud Denis-Remillard, Axel CassouVLM InterpretabilityVision-Language-Action Models

  21. Depth-Wise Probing and Pruning of the Planning Token in a Driving Vision-Language-Action Model

    Aug 7, 2026Harisankar Babu, Benjamin Coors, Christopher Lang +3VLMs for Autonomous DrivingEfficient VLA Model Inference

  22. TEMPO: Semantic-Action Decoupled RL Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 7, 2026Ziheng Liu, Quantao YangRobotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  23. WNM-3D: A World Navigation Model with 3D Scene Conditioning for Closed-Loop VLN

    Aug 7, 2026Yuehao Huang, Yunzi Wu, Xiaotao Zhang +7World Model LearningVision-Language Navigation