VLMs for Robotics

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2% vs.\ 40.95%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100,Hz control. Project website: intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/

Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $μ$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $μ$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

The recent trend in scaling models for robot learning has resulted in impressive policies that can perform various manipulation tasks and generalize to novel scenarios. However, these policies continue to struggle with following instructions, likely due to the limited linguistic and action sequence diversity in existing robotics datasets. This paper introduces Task Robustness via Re-Labelling Vision-Action Robot Data (TREAD), a scalable framework that leverages large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to augment existing robotics datasets without additional data collection, harnessing the transferable knowledge embedded in these models. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM through three stages: generating semantic sub-tasks from original instruction labels and initial scenes, segmenting demonstration videos conditioned on these sub-tasks, and producing diverse instructions that incorporate object properties, effectively decomposing longer demonstrations into grounded language-action pairs. We further enhance robustness by augmenting the data with linguistically diverse versions of the text goals. Evaluations on LIBERO demonstrate that policies trained on our augmented datasets exhibit improved performance on novel, unseen tasks and goals. Our results show that TREAD enhances both planning generalization through trajectory decomposition and language-conditioned policy generalization through increased linguistic diversity.

Fine-tuning vision-language-action (VLA) policies for long-horizon manipulation still relies heavily on behavior cloning, which requires costly high-quality demonstrations and keeps policies near the demonstration distribution. Reward models can reduce this dependence by reweighting demonstrations and providing dense supervision for on-robot reinforcement learning (RL), but they must be dense, accurate, and general. Existing methods fall short: task-specific stage-aware models are accurate but require per-task annotations, while general vision-language-model (VLM) reward models are broadly applicable but too coarse for fine-grained long-horizon progress. We introduce RM, a multi-task stage-aware reward model that combines an action-primitive-based stage estimator with a multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) value head to produce dense per-step rewards across manipulation tasks. Building on RM, we further propose SPIRAL (Self-Policy Improvement via Reward-Aligned Learning), an on-policy reward-guided framework that improves VLA policies from cheap autonomous rollouts. On a 10-task benchmark, RM reduces value-estimation MSE by 80% over the strongest baselines; when used in SPIRAL, it improves task success from around 50% to near-perfect performance on Folding Shorts (58% to 100%) and Cleaning Whiteboard (50% to 90%), showing that high-quality dense rewards are key to a stable robot data flywheel. Project website: https://qianzhong-chen.github.io/sarm2.github.io/.

We introduce flow control of vision-language-action (VLA) models, a simple and effective way to steer VLA actions in real-time through generic inputs, such as a keyboard. This method can be used out-of-the-box and does not require retraining or fine-tuning VLAs. It enables relatively crude user inputs to steer a VLA to align with user intent. The VLA transforms these inputs into action samples drawn from the VLA expert action distribution learned during training, so that the generated actions are high quality (conformity to the action expert distribution) and high fidelity (reflecting the user's intent). We demonstrate that flow control has many desirable properties: (1) flow control accurately and responsively steers robot actions with user inputs, (2) it is robust to suboptimal user inputs, (3) it enables users to steer VLAs to achieve significantly higher success rates and faster task completion, and (4) fine-tuning a VLA on flow control trajectories improves the autonomous policy. Together, these results provide a simple and intuitive way for users to help steer VLA actions, increasing task performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a powerful framework for robotic manipulation, and recent studies have introduced tactile or force feedback into VLAs to address contact-rich tasks. However, these models are typically deployed as offline policies. When contact conditions shift from the training distribution, the policy cannot perform online adaptation, leading to problems such as inappropriate contact forces and inefficient retries. Therefore, we propose TORL-VLA, a tactile-guided online reinforcement learning framework that couples tactile feedback with policy refinement for contact-rich manipulation. Our method introduces a tactile-derived wrench-aware VLA to predict reference actions and future wrench sequences, while a lightweight online RL module is used to refine the reference actions. To stabilize learning from mixed exploratory policy-generated and human-intervention data, we introduce an intervention-censored critic that prevents post-intervention success from being wrongly credited to policy-generated actions preceding intervention. Real-robot experiments on long-horizon contact-rich tasks, including latch manipulation, coffee-cup placement, and egg handling, show that TORL-VLA improves success rates at both subtask and full-task levels, as well as time-bounded execution efficiency over strong baselines. Project page: https://torl-vla.github.io/

Spatial grounding remains a key limitation of vision-language-action (VLA) systems for robotic manipulation. While current models can recognize objects and follow language instructions, they often lack an explicit representation of how objects are arranged in space, including support, containment, ordering, occlusion, and depth-sensitive relations. We introduce EmbodimentSemantic, a spatial scene-graph dataset and benchmark for evaluating relational grounding in embodied manipulation. EmbodimentSemantic represents scenes as directed object-relation-object triplets, where each triplet specifies a spatial relation between an ordered pair of objects using a fixed set of relations. This representation enables direct evaluation of object binding, relation prediction, and spatial consistency. The dataset includes real-world manipulation observations collected with the low-cost SO101 robot arm, together with generated scene graphs for studying spatial grounding in practical robotic settings. To provide controlled validation, we also introduce a simulator-grounded LIBERO benchmark with over 60K manipulation frames and more than 120K camera-specific scene graphs across paired third-person and wrist views, where ground-truth relations are derived automatically from MuJoCo geometry, world coordinates, camera projections, and visibility constraints. We further test whether scene graphs improve downstream control by injecting them into existing VLA policy prompts. Experiments across open-source and commercial VLMs show that current models often predict plausible relations but struggle with exact depth-aware and viewpoint-dependent spatial structure. EmbodimentSemantic provides a unified framework for diagnosing spatial grounding in VLM perception and testing its utility for VLA manipulation.

Long-horizon robot operation requires spatio-temporal memory to record the environment state and recall it for downstream reasoning. Scene graphs and retrieval-augmented systems ground VLM descriptions to persistent 3D entities with rich semantic descriptions. However, VLM captions are noisy and viewpoint-inconsistent, and existing systems treat them as an oracle with no mechanism to detect unreliable stored descriptions. We introduce object-level semantic uncertainty for multi-view VLM memory: a score that measures object-centric cross-view semantic scatter of captions and identifies semantically unresolved objects. Then, we include our uncertainty scores in an advanced spatial-semantic memory system, that we dub UQ-DAAAM. UQ-DAAAM uses this score to actively refine uncertain objects under a fixed query budget by selecting high-quality views and fusing the resulting multi-view captions into a single object description. We also derive probabilistic guarantees showing that higher-quality candidate views (as selected by our approach) are more likely to reduce uncertainty. Our experiments show that uncertainty quantification can make embodied 4D memory systems more reliable and more effective. In particular, on the OC-NaVQA benchmark, UQ-DAAAM achieves substantially larger uncertainty reduction and better spatio-temporal question answering performance than baselines.

Robotics faces a fundamental challenge of data scarcity. Unlike language or vision research, there is no internet-scale dataset for robotic manipulation. A promising path forward is to leverage egocentric human data, which can be collected more easily, with greater breadth, and at a larger scale. Towards this end, we investigate key design choices for learning across human and humanoid embodiments equipped with dexterous five-finger hands, using the $π_{0.5}$ model as a foundation. Our results show that human data enables robots to learn new task semantics and compose existing skills into novel behaviors without corresponding robot data. The paper website is here: https://egopipaper.github.io/

Deploying vision--language--action (VLA) models on robots requires adapting model-specific inference pipelines to heterogeneous processors and limited onboard memory. We present vla.cpp, a unified C++ inference runtime for eleven VLA models, with no PyTorch dependency for model execution. The runtime shares model loading, tensor execution, and serving while retaining architecture-specific attention, conditioning, and action heads. Iterative policies reuse observation-dependent computation across solver steps, while regression policies predict actions directly. We evaluate task success on LIBERO-Object and profile supported configurations on NVIDIA, Apple, and Intel hardware. BitVLA completes 200/200 LIBERO-Object episodes on an 8,GB Jetson Orin Nano. A ternary tensor-core kernel accelerates its client inference by $4.0$--$4.6\times$ over the CUDA-core baseline on RTX 3060 and AGX Orin. A SmolVLA case study links positional-index precision to gripper commands and task success, showing why fixed-input numerical checks should accompany rollout evaluation. Deployments on UR10e and ALOHA demonstrate physical robot integration; delay and execution-horizon studies characterize synchronous chunked control. The results demonstrate a common deployment path across VLA architectures and hardware, with numerical validation and control settings guiding deployment alongside inference efficiency.

Object navigation requires a robot to search for an unobserved target in an unknown environment by deciding where to explore next under partial observability. Effective search resembles human-like exploration: selectively probing visually promising frontiers while relying on spatial memory to avoid redundant revisits. We propose IntentNav, a spatial-visual imitation framework that learns human-like ObjectNav policies from human demonstrations. To infer high-level search intent from low-level human actions, we introduce Frontier-based Human-Intent Labeling, which looks ahead in human demonstrations and labels the frontier that best explains the demonstrator's future search direction. We construct a spatial-visual candidate space, where BEV memory tracks explored regions, unexplored frontiers, and trajectory history, while egocentric visual memory provides semantic cues for each candidate. A VLM policy is trained to select among these grounded candidates, using Intent-Aligned Objective to encourage consistent and human-like exploration. IntentNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MP3D, HM3D-v1 and HM3D-v2 ObjectNav benchmarks. The proposed candidate-level navigation interface transfers zero-shot to wheeled, quadruped, and humanoid robots without further VLM fine-tuning. Project page.

Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation requires robots to reason over flexible instructions and complex multi-object scenes while adaptively planning, executing, monitoring, and recovering from failures. We address these demands with a closed agent loop in which a VLM orchestrates heterogeneous robot capabilities as interruptible tools. Unlike in virtual AI agents, the timing of decisions, actions and tool calls is important in a physical world that does not pause for reasoning. We refer to this setting as Physical Orchestration, and propose VoLoAgent, a VLM that plans, monitors, and recovers by treating a VLA/WAM as an interruptible tool it steers mid-rollout alongside vision models and action primitives. To evaluate these long-horizon capabilities, we introduce RoboVoLo, a high-fidelity benchmark for open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation across common sense, memory/state tracking, complex references, and world knowledge, with both task-level success and failure-mode diagnostics. Experiments show VoLoAgent substantially outperforms single VLA/VLM or tool-based systems, with validation on real-robot experiments. Project page: https://chicychen.github.io/VoLo/

Humans often take longer to demonstrate a task than a robot would need to execute it. Rather than learning to replicate the demonstration at the same pace, many industrial and practical applications require robots to perform tasks as quickly as possible. In this paper, we investigate several hypotheses for learning policies that operate faster-than-demonstrations. Our experiments show that the most effective strategy is to downsample recorded demonstrations and train the robot's policy on this accelerated data. However, uniformly downsampling an entire trajectory can be problematic. Some parts of a task can be safely sped up (e.g., unconstrained motion), while others demand slower, more precise motion (e.g., object interactions or fine manipulation). To address this challenge, we introduce VOLT, a vision-and-language trajectory segmentation method that reasons over video demonstrations, and leverages contextual cues to determine when acceleration is appropriate and when careful precision is required. VOLT identifies segments where slow, deliberate motion is necessary, then selectively downsamples the remaining segments. The resulting reformatted trajectories can be used with standard imitation learning approaches, such as diffusion policies. Our results highlight that segmentation quality is critical -- baseline methods often misidentify when acceleration is possible, leading to overly cautious or unreliable policies. Compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, VOLT allows robots to execute tasks faster while maintaining strong performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies remain brittle in long-horizon control, where one-pass action decoding offers limited inference-time deliberation. Explicit chain-of-thought adds reasoning depth but incurs token-generation latency and an indirect text-to-action interface. We propose MPCoT, a reward-guided multi-path latent reasoning framework with configurable depth K and width M. MPCoT initializes M latent hypotheses, refines them for K weight-tied steps, and softly aggregates them before action decoding. A training-only path-preference objective combines expert-trajectory consistency, frozen Qwen3-VL progress scores, and endpoint-consistency feedback to supervise the path scorer. Under matched protocols on LIBERO and CALVIN, MPCoT improves long-horizon performance; ablations support the contributions of depth, width, soft aggregation, and reward supervision. On five real-world ALOHA Mini bimanual tasks, average success increases from 71.3% to 82.0% over the matched OpenVLA-OFT baseline. These results support latent deliberation as a means of improving execution while preserving the action interface and generating no reasoning tokens.

This paper presents a distributed conversational framework for human-robot collaborative manipulation that integrates local language and vision-language models (VLMs) with a Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2)-based execution stack. Language understanding, visual grounding, orchestration, and motion execution run as separate ROS 2 nodes, enabling flexible deployment across distributed hardware while maintaining a responsive control loop. From free-form user commands, the system generates structured action requests for pick, place, and handover. It uses a VLM to return image-space targets, which are converted into metric robot-frame goals using depth and calibration. A web dashboard exposes intermediate intent and grounding overlays (pixel, depth, and robot-frame) and requires explicit operator confirmation before any motion is executed. Experiments on a Franka FR3 platform evaluate end-to-end task reliability and latency under increasing working table scene ambiguity and compare alternative LLM/VLM configurations in the same pipeline. Code and full documentation are available at github.com/cogrob-tuni/franka-llm.

Many modern vision-language models (VLMs) build on autoregressive decoding of discrete tokens. While text-based output interfaces enable scalable pretraining and strong zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, they are poorly suited for problems that require precise continuous outputs, such as localizing temporal boundaries of events or generating robotic control actions. To address this challenge, we propose DRIFT, a general framework for adapting pretrained VLMs to continuous decoding tasks. DRIFT combines a base predictor, which provides a coarse estimate of the target output, with a generative refinement module based on flow matching that iteratively improves the prediction. This residual formulation transforms the generative modeling problem from learning a global output distribution to modeling a localized residual distribution around a strong prior, substantially simplifying optimization. We evaluate DRIFT on both perception and planning tasks, including visual grounding and robotic control. Across multiple tasks and architectures spanning MLLMs, VLAs, and WAMs, DRIFT consistently outperforms a strong set of regression- and generative-based solutions.

Post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models into policies that can be reliably deployed on real robots remains a major bottleneck. SFT and DAgger exploit failure signals only indirectly, and reward-based RL is bottlenecked by the difficulty of real-world reward design and of training reliable critics. We present FlowPRO, a reward-free offline reinforced fine-tuning framework for flow-matching VLAs. Algorithmically, we propose RPRO (Robotic Flow-matching Proximalized Preference Optimization), a preference-optimization objective tailored to the flow-matching action head of VLA models. RPRO pairs a contrastive optimizer with an explicit proximal regularizer that anchors the absolute magnitude of the implicit reward, thereby eliminating the reward-hacking failure mode of plain Flow-DPO. On the data side, a teleoperated intervention-and-rollback paradigm produces naturally paired positive and negative trajectories $(τ^w, τ^l)$ on a real robot from a single operator action; a Smooth Interpolation procedure, combined with batch mixing, then converts these sparse corrections into dense per-state supervision while preserving the base policy's capabilities. On four long-horizon bimanual tasks, FlowPRO attains the highest success rate, outperforming four representative baselines, and ablations confirm the contribution of each loss component.

Wide-baseline matching (WBM) requires integrating geometric understanding, viewpoint changes, fine-grained perception, and occlusion reasoning, making it a challenging testbed for spatial reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deployed in physical environments. However, current MLLMs lack systematic evaluation and training frameworks for these capabilities. We introduce ReasonMatch-Bench, a benchmark stratified by viewpoint displacement and matching granularity across indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenarios, and show that current MLLMs still struggle with fine-grained wide-baseline correspondence: on a difficult 90-sample subset, human annotators achieve 84.0 F1, while the best existing baseline reaches 37.2. To bridge this gap, we build a scalable data-generation pipeline that automatically extracts wide-baseline view pairs from large-scale video-3D corpora, including RGB-D videos and SfM reconstructions, yielding diverse and verifiable supervision. We further propose Dynamic Correspondence Reinforcement Learning (DCRL), which combines Image-Level Viewpoint Progression and Point-Level Correspondence Curriculum to improve WBM training through verifiable rewards without explicit CoT supervision. Extensive experiments show that DCRL substantially improves ReasonMatch-Bench and transfers to related spatial benchmarks, while maintaining general visual understanding performance with modest gains on several benchmarks.

Building memory is essential for long-horizon planning in zero-shot embodied navigation. Detector-centric scene graphs often compress observations into sparse nodes, discarding fine-grained visual evidence and accumulating noise, while 3D reconstruction-based methods remain computationally prohibitive. We present EvoMemNav, an efficient, self-evolving, fine-grained memory framework for zero-shot embodied navigation. EvoMemNav constructs a Visual-Semantic Memory Graph (VSMGraph) that keeps raw views as first-class memory and organizes them with lightweight semantic cues and topological relations into a room-view-object hierarchy, preserving fine-grained details for disambiguation and Stop verification. To scale to growing memory, we introduce a budgeted coarse-to-fine policy: a coarse stage compresses the search space into promising regions, and a fine stage invokes a VLM only for targeted verification and decision. Beyond static memories, EvoMemNav performs reflection-driven write-back after each subtask, updating graph-attached priors that encode accumulated environmental knowledge to refine future decisions without retraining. Experiments on GOAT-Bench and HM3D across object, text-description, and image-goal modalities show consistent gains in SR/SPL, with better multi-instance disambiguation, fewer premature stops, and stronger zero-shot generalization.

While household robots are often evaluated based on task completion, everyday domestic environments involve value-conflicting situations where robots are expected to choose actions that prioritize diverse values such as human autonomy, efficiency, or social appropriateness. Yet, there are no benchmarks for evaluating robots' value preferences in such scenarios. We introduce RobotValues, a benchmark to evaluate household robot planners in 8K value-conflict scenarios. Each instance consists of a realistic, synthetically generated household image with multiple plausible robot actions that prioritize different human values. We construct ROBOTVALUES through LLM-assisted scenario generation, stakeholder-grounded value extraction, image generation and automatic quality control. We evaluate 10 VLMs used in robotics and find that models show default value preferences, including safety and accommodation, while underselecting privacy-prioritizing actions. When models are prompted to prioritize values that conflict with their preferences, models often fail to override the default actions, choosing incorrect actions 80% of the time on average across models. These findings highlight the need to go beyond task completion or safety evaluations and assess robots' decision-making capability when human values conflict.

In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control. However, their performance is limited by the same perceptual bottleneck: visual hallucinations arise due to the models' inability to distinguish task-relevant objects from distractors. In principle, accurate identification and focus on critical objects while filtering out irrelevant ones is the key to break this limitation. A straightforward solution is one-step focus: directly attending to essential objects. However, this approach proves ineffective because effective focus inherently requires deep scene understanding. To this end, we propose SceneDiver, a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation method for VLMs leveraging their long-term planning abilities, that first constructs a holistic scene graph to establish initial comprehension, then progressively decomposes the task into simpler sub-problems through an iterative cycle of recognition, understanding, and analysis. To enable reactive control, we also design a lightweight adapter for distilling the deliberate focus ability into VLAs. Evaluations on standard embodied AI benchmarks confirm that our method substantially reduces visual hallucinations for both VLMs and VLAs, while preserving computational efficiency in tasks requiring fast execution. Our code and data are released at: https://future-item.github.io/SceneDiver.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models trained on large-scale data have made remarkable progress, but they remain vulnerable to distribution shifts at deployment time. Recent VLA models suggest that prompts can serve as an efficient interface for steering policy behavior, but existing prompt-based steering typically relies on external guidance. This raises a natural question: can test-time training (TTT) for VLA be achieved by optimizing a prompt, so that the steering interface itself can be learned and adapted from interaction? We address this question with TTT-VLA, a test-time training framework based on Latent Prompt Optimization (LPO). During training, the latent prompt is learned with an additional proxy task, providing an extra learned conditioning signal for policy learning. At test time, TTT is performed by collecting interaction data from the current environment and optimizing only the latent prompt on those data using the proxy task's self-supervised signal, without modifying the policy itself. Experiments on SimplerEnv demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves task success rates in both single- and multi-embodiment settings. Further analysis shows that the gains arise primarily from correcting a small number of critical decisions rather than globally altering policy behavior. These results suggest that LPO provides an effective and practical pathway for deployment-time improvement of foundation manipulation policies.

The KV-cache is the right memory for datacenters but the wrong memory for robots. Datacenter inference batches many short requests and resets them, amortizing an attention cache across a crowd. Embodied agents instead run one long, non-resetting episode on bandwidth-limited edge hardware, where high-bandwidth memory and flash are scarce, flash has finite write endurance, and memory writes rather than compute can become the binding constraint. AURA-Mem (Action-Utility Recurrent Adaptive Memory) targets this regime. It wraps a frozen vision-language-action backbone with a constant-size recurrent memory and a learned gate that writes only when the current observation would change the next action: memory that knows when to stay silent. Unlike reconstruction-based memory, the gate is trained directly against a closed-loop action-error signal. Its inference state is fixed at 4,224 bytes regardless of horizon, while a KV-cache grows to 6,061 times larger at 100,000 steps. On a controlled synthetic benchmark, AURA-Mem matches the best O(1) baseline in accuracy while using 5.19-6.13 times fewer writes, and up to 9.19 times fewer writes on easier configurations. Budget-matched random and periodic schedules do not recover this gain, isolating the benefit to the action-surprise signal. On a trained closed-loop OpenVLA-OFT 7B panel on LIBERO-Long (n=60 episodes per arm), the gate does not hurt success: AURA-Mem matches the ungated base policy (0.233) and slightly exceeds an always-write KV arm (0.217), while using 7.0 times fewer writes and constant memory. We also instantiate an approximate-information-state value-loss bound as a methodology demonstration; at this scale, the bound is vacuous rather than a guarantee.

Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control. We present S2 (See Less, Specify More), a framework for improving VLA generalization by training the executor under a cleaner interface. Specify More preserves the original instruction as a stable high-level goal while relabeling each trajectory into refined trajectory- and subtask-level language that disambiguates the current execution mode. Unlike native attention, See Less imposes an explicit visual evidence budget, training the executor to act from task-sufficient evidence rather than unconstrained visual context, without any region or mask annotation. This interface lets the executor follow detailed guidance without relying on distracting visual patches or resolving avoidable ambiguity on its own, and it remains compatible with off-the-shelf VLM planners through in-context learning. Across our main evaluation settings, S2 improves overall generalization metrics by changing the executor's learning problem: coarse instructions induce avoidable supervision aliasing, goal-preserving local guidance outperforms instruction replacement in our main ablations, and explicit evidence budgeting reduces dependence on broad visual context beyond efficiency considerations. Across eight real-robot tasks on TX-G2 (an AgiBot G2-compatible variant) and HSR, S2 raises mean subtask success from 54.2% to 79.0% over pi0.5. Together, these results suggest that VLA generalization improves when the executor is trained to act from informative local guidance and task-sufficient visual evidence, rather than recovering both from weak supervision.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize across static manipulation but fail when objects move during task execution. They map the current observation to an action and assume the scene is stationary between observation and execution, so at any non-trivial object speed the resulting latency exceeds the time available to grasp. We close this gap with AHEAD (Anticipatory Horizon Extrapolation with Adaptive Dynamics), a predict-then-act wrapper that augments a frozen VLA with a motion-aware latent world model. A small world model trained on manipulation video forecasts future patch tokens in the VLA's feature space, conditioned on per-token velocity and acceleration from optical flow. A language-and-motion saliency mask concentrates prediction on task-relevant patches, and the model rolls forward for an adaptive horizon, halting when prediction uncertainty crosses a threshold. The frozen action decoder then receives the predicted future tokens in place of the current ones. AHEAD adds 4.9M parameters to a frozen 7B OpenVLA and reaches 79 to 97% success across 20 dynamic simulation scenarios where the strongest baseline reaches 31 to 58%. On a physical UFactory xArm 7, AHEAD succeeds on 29/30 to 30/30 on three conveyor and rolling-ball tasks, 23/30 on paddle interception, and 19/30 on projectile catching where every baseline scores 0/30.

End-to-end manipulation policies, combined with web-scale pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), show the promise for generalizable and dexterous robotic manipulation. However, they inherit two key limitations from 2D foundation models: 1) the reliance on 2D RGB inputs that ignores the intrinsically 3D nature of manipulation; and 2) the lack of spatial 3D alignment between input-output spaces as well as across diverse robot embodiments, camera setups, and trajectory datasets. In this paper, we present a series of contributions to address these issues. First, we introduce aligned vertex map and vertex spectrum -- a pixel-wise 3D representation that elevates 2D visual inputs to 3D, using camera calibration and optional depth. This novel input representation marries 3D awareness with the generalization of 2D large VLMs. Then, we propose to align the inputs and outputs of manipulation policies by expressing per-pixel 3D information of each camera view and robot actions to a shared coordinate. Based on this, we designate a canonical Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) alignment frame and innovatively propose to construct BEV images, producing a view-invariant representation robust to camera pose variations. To enable training and evaluation at scale, we develop a comprehensive data processing pipeline to perform such alignments; we also introduce a novel temporal alignment scheme for trajectories across diverse robots, human operators, and datasets. These contributions collectively mitigate input and output spatial-temporal misalignments, improving the consistency and generalization for real-world manipulation. Pretrained checkpoint, source code and data processing pipeline are available in https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/Dex-BEV.

WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and instruction. Although convenient, this chunk-centric formulation creates a fundamental granularity mismatch. Language describes semantic goals and events, vision evolves through continuous scene dynamics, and actions operate at control-level timescales; forcing all three into the same fixed-length prediction window turns VLA training into short-horizon correlation fitting. WALL-WM addresses this mismatch by organizing both supervision and data around semantic events. Specifically, it pairs event-grounded VLA pretraining with a data ecosystem built from event-level captions and cluster-balanced sampling, enabling scalable learning over diverse behaviors, scenes, and task structures. From the same event-pretrained backbone, WALL-WM supports two complementary inference modes. The event mode consumes next-event descriptions and enables variable-length execution chunks, while the unified mode uses a VLM with Staircase Decoding to condition conventional fixed-length chunk inference while preserving a gradient-continuous VLA path. Together with Muon-optimizer-based large-scale pretraining infrastructure, WALL-WM provides a practical scale-up recipe for general-purpose WAMs. Experiments show that WALL-WM generalizes broadly across language, scenes, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in large-scale real-world generalization evaluation.

Current benchmarks for embodied vision-language planning inadvertently favor linguistic next-token prediction over physically grounded next-state reasoning. This rewards models that mimic statistical language priors rather than track true causal dependencies, reducing complex physical planning to shallow sequence modeling. Hence, achieving genuine physical autonomy requires a fundamental shift from linguistically grounded token prediction toward physically grounded causal reasoning. To this end, we introduce Causal-Plan-Bench, a high-fidelity diagnostic suite spanning four causal dimensions, curated via multi-stage verification. To endow models with this capability, a four-stage annotation pipeline extracts structured interaction records from egocentric videos to construct Causal-Plan-1M, a dense million-scale corpus of explicit causal reasoning traces. Extensive evaluation reveals a striking gap: leading models struggle to demonstrate genuine physical agency -- even GPT-6-astra scores only 43.04. In contrast, our tailored training recipe enables Causal Planner to internalize the complex physical logic required for accurate next-state estimation. Built upon Qwen3-VL-8B, Causal Planner raises its backbone's score from 33.23 to 45.28, a 36.3% relative gain, and improves on three external benchmarks without benchmark-specific adaptation. We further observe an empirical Causal-Supervision Scaling Trend. Paired no-vision controls also reveal substantial visual dependence, while cross-judge comparisons and human scoring assess the reliability of automated evaluation. More importantly, we initiate the first effort to turn agents from superficial token predictors into physically grounded causal reasoners, bridging language modeling and world modeling.

Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) poses a formidable challenge for autonomous agents, requiring seamless integration of natural language instructions and visual observations to navigate complex 3D indoor spaces. Existing approaches often falter in long-horizon tasks due to limited scene understanding, inefficient planning, and lack of robust decision-making frameworks. We introduce the \textbf{Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation (HSAN)} framework, a groundbreaking approach that redefines VLN-CE through three synergistic innovations. First, HSAN constructs a dynamic hierarchical semantic scene graph, leveraging vision-language models to capture multi-level environmental representations, from objects to regions to zones, enabling nuanced spatial reasoning. Second, it employs an optimal transport-based topological planner, grounded in Kantorovich's duality, to select long-term goals by balancing semantic relevance and spatial accessibility with theoretical guarantees of optimality. Third, a graph-aware reinforcement learning policy ensures precise low-level control, navigating subgoals while robustly avoiding obstacles. By integrating spectral graph theory, optimal transport, and advanced multi-modal learning, HSAN addresses the shortcomings of static maps and heuristic planners prevalent in prior work. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging VLN-CE datasets demonstrate that HSAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in navigation success and generalization to unseen environments.

Natural language is a powerful reasoning medium for language and vision-language models, but it is mismatched to the granularity of continuous control. Text and explicit subgoals operate at task-level granularity, whereas vision-language-action (VLA) policies must choose actions at a much finer temporal scale; a single reasoning step can therefore span many action chunks while remaining only weakly coupled to the action needed now. This suggests a different question for VLA: what should play the role of language? We argue that a useful VLA reasoning medium must be shareable across model instances, verifiable through downstream action improvement, and aligned with temporally extended control structure. Based on this view, we propose Continuous Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action. Our model first predicts continuous reasoning in the form of a structured set of continuous thoughts, then reuses them as shared context for chunk-structured action generation. Better action prediction alone does not certify good reasoning: if the same internal medium cannot be shared across model instances and independently verified through improved downstream control, the added latent may simply become a model-private shortcut that helps on seen behaviors without supporting generalizable control. We therefore instantiate continuous reasoning as a shared Gaussian latent interface and train it with a self-verification objective in which an exponential-moving-average teacher must successfully consume the student's reasoning when predicting target actions. Empirically, Continuous Reasoning improves LIBERO-PRO robustness and performs strongly on real robots, raising mean subtask success over π0.5 by 40.4% on TX-G2, an AgiBot G2-compatible variant, and 26.3% on HSR. This suggests that reasoning in VLA is less about extra tokens than about a shareable, verifiable internal language for action.