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 1,154

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

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CardsList
  1. MIRTH: Mutual-Information Reasoning with Temporal Hubs for Vision-Language-Action Agents

    Jun 30, 2026Hao Sun, Yu Song, Shiyu Teng +2Vision-Language-Action Models

  2. Reasoning-aware Speculative Decoding for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving

    Jun 30, 2026Anh Dung Dinh, Simon Khan, Flora SalimEfficient VLM InferenceSpeculative Decoding

  3. Vision-Language-Action Models: Experimental Insights from a Real-World UR5 Platform

    Jun 29, 2026Mathilde Hochedel, Marc LalondeVLM AdaptationRobotic Manipulation

  4. SA-VLA: State-aware tokenizer for improving Vision-Language-Action Models' performance

    Jun 29, 2026Tengyue Jiang, Chunpu Xu, Jiayue Kang +1Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  5. Trust Your Instincts: Confidence-Driven Test-Time RL for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 29, 2026Siyao Chen, Jiakang Yuan, Jiaxin Wang +1Intrinsic Reward MethodsReinforcement Learning

  6. Position: Vision-Language-Action Models Cannot Be Verified to Perform Physical Reasoning

    Jun 28, 2026Taozhao Chen, Ian Manchester, Huaming ChenVLM EvaluationPhysical Reasoning

  7. Fast Enough to Act: Spatio-Temporal Visual Token Merging for Low-Latency Robotic VLMs and VLAs

    Jun 28, 2026Junzhou Chen, Jindong Wang, Gang ZhouEfficient VLM InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

  8. SurgVLA-Bench: Towards Evaluating Vision-Language-Action Models for Laparoscopic Surgical Robotics

    Jun 28, 2026Jiashuo Sun, Yue He, Wenxuan Liu +4Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

  9. TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Models

    Jun 27, 2026Mark Van der Merwe, Mohamad Louai Shehab, Jayjun Lee +4Vision-Language-Action ModelsTactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

  10. S2^2-VLA: State-Space Guided Vision-Language-Action Models for Long-Horizon Manipulation

    Jun 26, 2026Zhipeng Xie, Zongyi Han, Xiangyi Wei +3Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  11. SpikeVLA: Vision-Language-Action Models with Spiking Neural Networks

    Jun 26, 2026Ruiqi Song, Dujun Nie, Siyu Teng +7Spiking Neural NetworksVision-Language-Action Models

  12. Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?

    Jun 26, 2026Guoheng Sun, Kaixi Feng, Shwai He +8Model CompressionEfficient VLA Models

  13. Direct Action-Head Injection of A Grounded 3D Point Unlocks Spatial and Task Generalization

    Jun 26, 2026Shiang-Feng Tsai, Jin-Cheng Jhang, Yen-Ling Tai +5Generalization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  14. Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation

    Jun 25, 2026Arthur Allshire, Himanshu Gaurav Singh, Ritvik Singh +15Robot Policy LearningDiffusion Transformer

  15. RouterVLA: Turning Smoke Tests into Supervision for Heterogeneous VLA Selection

    Jun 25, 2026Xingyu Ren, Chugang Yi, Ge Ma +1Robot Policy LearningAI Agent Evaluation

  16. LA4VLA: Learning to Act without Seeing via Language-Action Pretraining

    Jun 25, 2026Tao Lin, Yuxin Du, Yiran Mao +13Language Model PretrainingVisuomotor Policy Learning

  17. PhysReflect-VLA: Physical Feasibility and Self-Reflective Regulation for Reliable Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Jun 25, 2026Jiayu Yang, Tao Yang, Weijun Li +4Robot Policy LearningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

  18. PAMAE: Phase-Aware-MoE Action Experts Towards Reliable Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Jun 25, 2026Jiayu Yang, Tao Yang, Xiang Chang +3Flow MatchingLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  19. ForesightSafety-VLA: A Unified Diagnostic Safety Benchmark for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 25, 2026Mingyang Lyu, Yinqian Sun, Yiyang Jia +5RoboticsRobot Safety

  20. Improving Vision-Language-Action Model Fine-Tuning with Structured Stage and Keyframe Supervision

    Jun 25, 2026Yuan Xu, Yixiang Chen, Kai Wang +5Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationVLM Adaptation

  21. Learning Action Priors for Cross-embodiment Robot Manipulation

    Jun 24, 2026Dong Jing, Tianqi Zhang, Jiaqi Liu +5Cross-Embodiment Robot LearningRobotic Manipulation

  22. In-Context World Modeling for Robotic Control

    Jun 24, 2026Siyin Wang, Junhao Shi, Senyu Fei +4ICL for RoboticsWorld Model Learning

  23. FORCE: Efficient VLA Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Value-Calibrated Warm-up and Self-Distillation

    Jun 24, 2026Shuyi Zhang, Yunfan Lou, Hongyang Cheng +8RL for RoboticsVision-Language-Action Models

  24. Action ControlNet: A Lightweight Delay-Aware Adapter for Smooth Asynchronous Control in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 24, 2026Tiecheng Guo, Meng GuoRobotic ControlLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  25. ROAD-VLA: Robust Online Adaptation via Self-Distillation for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 24, 2026Kejing Wang, Toan Nguyen, Minh Hoang Nguyen +2Robot Policy AdaptationVLM Adaptation

  26. WOLF-VLA: Whole-Body Humanoid Optimal Locomotion Framework for Vision-Language-Action Learning

    Jun 24, 2026Melya Boukheddimi, Omar Adjali, Daniel Sontag +1Robotic ControlHumanoid Robot Locomotion