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. What Do They See? Interpreting Complex Road Scenarios Through the Eyes of Vision-Language-Action Models for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicle Learning

    Jul 18, 2026Kalpana Panda, Wesley Maia, Vinti Agarwal +1Autonomous Driving DatasetsCounterfactual Explanations

  2. Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 17, 2026Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu +1Reward ShapingLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

  3. JoyNexus: Service-Oriented Multi-Tenant Post-Training for VLA Models

    Jul 17, 2026Haoran Sun, Wentao Zhang, Junyang Hua +18Efficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

  4. AC-VLA: Robust Out-of-Distribution Action Execution via Compositional Learning

    Jul 17, 2026Xiaojiang Peng, Kai Peng, Jie Lu +3Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  5. Think at 5 Hz, Act at 20 Hz: Asynchronous Fast-Slow Vision-Language-Action Inference for Closed-Loop Driving

    Jul 17, 2026Yun Li, Jiachen Gong, Simon Thompson +7Efficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

  6. Video = World + Event Stream

    Jul 16, 2026Lianghua Huang, Zhi-Fan Wu, Yupeng Shi +24Audio-Visual UnderstandingStreaming Video Understanding

  7. CosFly-VLA: A Spatially Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Tracking

    Jul 16, 2026Ruilong Ren, Songsheng Cheng, Yunpeng Zhou +9Aerial RoboticsVisual Object Tracking

  8. Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: LifelongVision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 16, 2026Yao He, Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang +2Continual Robot LearningRobot Skill Learning

  9. FoMoVLA: Bridging Visual Foresight and Motion Guidance for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 16, 2026Wei Li, Peijin Jia, Yuan Ma +9Visuomotor Policy LearningVision-Language-Action Models

  10. Reflex: Real-Time VLA Control through Streaming Inference

    Jul 16, 2026Yuanchun Guo, Bingyan LiuFlow MatchingKV Caching

  11. Action QFormer: Structured Representation Shaping under Action Supervision in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 16, 2026Yufeng Ji, Wenhao Tang, Haoyi Niu +3VLM AdaptationVision-Language-Action Models

  12. DiMaS: Distribution Matching for Steering Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 15, 2026Pegah Khayatan, Sara Meziane, Jayneel Parekh +1Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationDistribution Matching

  13. Never Too Late for Force: Accelerating VLA Post-Training with Reactive Force Injection

    Jul 15, 2026Yi Wang, Wendi Chen, Zimo Wen +8Robotic ControlLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  14. S-squared-VLA: Decoupling Semantic and Spatial Streams in Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

    Jul 15, 2026Jianguo Yu, Rukang Wang, Duanfeng Chu +3VLMs for Autonomous DrivingVision-Language-Action Models

  15. UESF-Bench: Benchmarking and Probing for Unified Embodied Seeking and Following

    Jul 15, 2026Kun Yu, Jianhua Yang, Yixiang Chen +7Embodied NavigationRobotics

  16. Semantic Anchoring for Robotic Action Representations

    Jul 15, 2026Yuan Xu, Youheng Shi, Chengyang Li +2Generalization in Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  17. Generalizable VLA Finetuning via Representation Anchoring and Language-Action Alignment

    Jul 15, 2026Dwip Dalal, Shivansh Patel, Chahit Jain +8Vision-Language-Action ModelsVision-Language Alignment

  18. ChunkFlow: Towards Continuity-Consistent Chunked Policy Learning

    Jul 14, 2026Zhao Yang, Yinan Shi, Mingyuan Yao +3Visuomotor Policy LearningVision-Language-Action Models

  19. ExToken: Structured Exploration for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning

    Jul 14, 2026Yilun Kong, Yunpeng Qing, Guozheng Ma +4RL ExplorationRobotic Manipulation

  20. EagleVLA: Towards Onboard Real-Time Robot Control via Foresight-Aligned Asynchronous Inference

    Jul 14, 2026Zebin Yang, Qi Wang, Yunhe Wang +6Efficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

  21. TrustVLA: Mechanism-Guided Inference-Time Defense Against Vision-Language-Action Backdoors

    Jul 14, 2026Pinhan Fu, Xianda Guo, Xuetao Li +5Adversarial Attacks on VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

  22. VistaVLA: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware 3D Gaussian-Grounded VLA for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 14, 2026Mohan Liu, Zhihao Gu, Xuanyu Chen +5Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation3D Spatial Reasoning

  23. Reducing Temporal Redundancy for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference

    Jul 14, 2026Yuzhou Wu, Yuxin Zheng, Muchun Niu +6Efficient VLA Model InferenceEfficient VLA Models

  24. See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for VLA Models

    Jul 13, 2026Byungkun Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Dongjin Kim +4Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation