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Nov 4

Integrating Reinforcement Learning, Action Model Learning, and Numeric Planning for Tackling Complex Tasks

Automated Planning algorithms require a model of the domain that specifies the preconditions and effects of each action. Obtaining such a domain model is notoriously hard. Algorithms for learning domain models exist, yet it remains unclear whether learning a domain model and planning is an effective approach for numeric planning environments, i.e., where states include discrete and numeric state variables. In this work, we explore the benefits of learning a numeric domain model and compare it with alternative model-free solutions. As a case study, we use two tasks in Minecraft, a popular sandbox game that has been used as an AI challenge. First, we consider an offline learning setting, where a set of expert trajectories are available to learn from. This is the standard setting for learning domain models. We used the Numeric Safe Action Model Learning (NSAM) algorithm to learn a numeric domain model and solve new problems with the learned domain model and a numeric planner. We call this model-based solution NSAM_(+p), and compare it to several model-free Imitation Learning (IL) and Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Empirical results show that some IL algorithms can learn faster to solve simple tasks, while NSAM_(+p) allows solving tasks that require long-term planning and enables generalizing to solve problems in larger environments. Then, we consider an online learning setting, where learning is done by moving an agent in the environment. For this setting, we introduce RAMP. In RAMP, observations collected during the agent's execution are used to simultaneously train an RL policy and learn a planning domain action model. This forms a positive feedback loop between the RL policy and the learned domain model. We demonstrate experimentally the benefits of using RAMP, showing that it finds more efficient plans and solves more problems than several RL baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025 1

See Once, Then Act: Vision-Language-Action Model with Task Learning from One-Shot Video Demonstrations

Developing robust and general-purpose manipulation policies represents a fundamental objective in robotics research. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising capabilities for end-to-end robot control, existing approaches still exhibit limited generalization to tasks beyond their training distributions. In contrast, humans possess remarkable proficiency in acquiring novel skills by simply observing others performing them once. Inspired by this capability, we propose ViVLA, a generalist robotic manipulation policy that achieves efficient task learning from a single expert demonstration video at test time. Our approach jointly processes an expert demonstration video alongside the robot's visual observations to predict both the demonstrated action sequences and subsequent robot actions, effectively distilling fine-grained manipulation knowledge from expert behavior and transferring it seamlessly to the agent. To enhance the performance of ViVLA, we develop a scalable expert-agent pair data generation pipeline capable of synthesizing paired trajectories from easily accessible human videos, further augmented by curated pairs from publicly available datasets. This pipeline produces a total of 892,911 expert-agent samples for training ViVLA. Experimental results demonstrate that our ViVLA is able to acquire novel manipulation skills from only a single expert demonstration video at test time. Our approach achieves over 30% improvement on unseen LIBERO tasks and maintains above 35% gains with cross-embodiment videos. Real-world experiments demonstrate effective learning from human videos, yielding more than 38% improvement on unseen tasks.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

MotuBrain: An Advanced World Action Model for Robot Control

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize semantically well but often lack fine-grained modeling of world dynamics. We present MotuBrain, a unified World Action Model that jointly models video and action under a UniDiffuser formulation with a three-stream Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. A single model supports policy learning, world modeling, video generation, inverse dynamics, and joint video-action prediction, while scaling to heterogeneous multimodal data such as video-only, task-agnostic, and cross-embodiment robot data. Building on Motus, MotuBrain further introduces unified multiview modeling, an independent text stream for stronger language-action coupling, a shared cross-embodiment action representation, and an efficient post-training and deployment recipe for long-horizon real-world control. Our inference stack combines step reduction, compilation, FP8 quantization, DiT caching, V2A-style action-only inference, and real-time chunked closed-loop execution, achieving over 50x speedup over a naive baseline and up to 11 Hz inference. Experimentally, MotuBrain achieves 95.8% and 96.1% average success on RoboTwin 2.0 under clean and randomized settings, respectively, attains the strongest reported EWMScore in our WorldArena comparison, and adapts to new humanoid embodiments with only 50--100 trajectories. These results show that unified world action models can scale in generality, predictive accuracy, and real-world deployability.

  • 20 authors
·
Apr 30

Delta-JEPA: Learning Action-Sensitive World Models via Latent Difference Decoding

Learning visual world models for planning requires compact latent dynamics that remain sensitive to actions, yet reconstruction-free joint-embedding objectives can collapse to action-insensitive representations. We propose Delta-JEPA, an end-to-end reconstruction-free world model that augments latent forward prediction with a Latent Difference Action Decoder (LDAD). Unlike inverse decoders that infer actions from concatenated endpoint embeddings, LDAD reconstructs the executed action from the latent displacement between consecutive observations. This displacement-level supervision directly regularizes transition geometry: adjacent embeddings cannot collapse without losing action information, and different actions are encouraged to induce distinguishable latent changes for rollout-based planning. Delta-JEPA uses only latent prediction and action reconstruction, avoiding pixel reconstruction and distribution-matching regularizers. Across four visual continuous-control tasks, Delta-JEPA improves planning over JEPA-based and representation-learning world model baselines. Ablations show that displacement-based action decoding is consistently more effective than endpoint concatenation, and action-sensitivity analyses show clearer action-conditioned latent responses. These results indicate that supervising latent differences is a simple and effective mechanism for collapse-resistant and action-sensitive world model learning.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 29 1

DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations

Most end-to-end autonomous-driving systems learn by imitating human driving logs, leaving their learned behavior constrained by the quality and behavioral coverage of the recorded trajectories. This report presents DriveZero, an end-to-end system that learns driving behavior beyond human demonstrations. It decomposes driving into a perception model and an action model, pretrains each in the regime best suited to it, and combines them into one end-to-end planner. The two models call for different learning recipes: perception must understand the world, and benefits from massive and diverse visual data; action must interact with it, and requires closed-loop feedback. On the action side, we introduce DriveRL, a mixed-agent closed-loop reinforcement-learning framework. It converts real driving logs into interactive worlds, where a privileged teacher policy is trained with PPO through closed-loop rollouts. For the perception model, DriveVFM consolidates multiple frozen vision foundation models, including DINOv3, SigLIP2, SAM and Depth Anything V2, into a single backbone from raw images alone, requiring no task-specific annotations. DriveZero then unifies the two: a camera-only planner that distills the frozen DriveRL teacher through its rolled-out trajectories. The goal-conditioned teacher can moreover be queried under augmented driving intents, yielding diverse, goal-consistent supervision that logged data cannot provide. On nuPlan, DriveRL with value-guided test-time action search achieves a mean score of 93.57 across the Val14, Test14-hard, and Test14-random community splits in both non-reactive and reactive modes, exceeding the Log-Replay expert on all three splits. DriveZero achieves state-of-the-art performance on NAVSIMv1, NAVSIMv2 and the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark without any human trajectory supervision.

  • 20 authors
·
Sep 4 3

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

ETHZurich ETH Zürich
·
Jun 14 3

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

Action-conditioned world models are a key component of embodied AI, serving as scalable policy evaluators that reduce reliance on expensive real-world rollouts. To accurately capture diverse action-induced dynamics, such models should satisfy three key objectives-Physical Plausibility (P), Action Adherence (A), and Visual Fidelity (V), collectively referred to as PAV-while remaining robust to both in-distribution (ID) expert demonstrations and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID action-video pairs and pixel-level reconstruction losses, which do not explicitly optimize PAV objectives and generalize poorly beyond expert data. To address this, we propose PAVXploreRL, a reinforcement learning framework built on a pretrained latent world model that explicitly optimizes PAV objectives through reward-driven training. To improve action generalization, our method jointly leverages ID trajectories and noise-driven OOD action exploration, without paired video supervision. Experiments show that PAVXploreRL consistently outperforms pretrained baselines, achieving a 5.6% average gain across benchmarks and producing higher-quality PAV properties. As a policy evaluator, it also yields more reliable performance estimates and reduces the overestimation bias of prior expert-only world models such as Ctrl-World. Code: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/PAVXploreRL

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 9

TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model

World action models improve robotic manipulation by conditioning actions on predicted futures, yet existing tactile variants largely inherit video-generation pipelines that reconstruct future tactile observations through iterative denoising. Such prediction can become unreliable under deployment drift: small changes in contact position or force may substantially alter tactile pixels even when the underlying contact evolution remains predictable. We introduce TacDyn-WAM, a heterogeneous visuo-tactile world action model that predicts implicit tactile dynamics rather than reconstructing future tactile observations. It learns TacRep, a dynamics-aware tactile target space trained through masked spatio-temporal prediction on tactile clips and regularized by relational structure distillation. A visual expert and an Implicit Tactile Dynamics Expert predict future visual and tactile representations in separate target spaces while interacting through joint attention; the tactile expert predicts future representations and their changes at multiple horizons in a single forward pass, and a read-only tactile memory supplies the current tactile state. On UniVTAC, TacDyn-WAM achieves an average success rate of 81.5% using only the provided demonstrations, reaching state-of-the-art-level performance and remaining competitive with models pretrained on large-scale visuo-tactile trajectories. Ablations confirm the benefits of both tactile pathways and TacRep over pixel-reconstruction and static alternatives. On five real-robot tasks, TacDyn-WAM reaches 71.0% average success, and modest-scale pretraining raises it to 85.0%, further validating our method.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 29

DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations. Video generative models offer a promising foundation by encoding rich spatiotemporal priors through future predictions. However, existing Video-Action Models either couple video and action prediction in a shared backbone, making policy adaptation harder to optimize, or under-utilize video information when guiding the action branch. In this work, we introduce DeVA, a Decoupled Video-Action model with specialized video and action experts, multi-level feature transfer, and physically salient guidance. DeVA transfers representations from multiple video layers to the action expert, enabling rich information exchange while making policy learning more tractable. It further supervises intermediate video features and the action stream with physically salient guidance (affordance/depth). Experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world deployment demonstrate strong performance with limited data, faster convergence than a unified architecture, and clear performance gains from physical guidance.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 26

HARP-VLA: Human-Robot Aligned Representation Learning for Vision-Language-Action Model

Learning generalizable vision-language-action (VLA) models from large-scale human videos is promising but challenging due to cross-embodiment discrepancies in both visual observations and executable actions. While latent action models reduce the action execution gap by learning action abstractions, they still rely on visual features. Thus, misaligned human and robot visual representations can lead to inconsistencies in policy inputs and induce domain-dependent latent actions, hindering effective co-training with human videos. To address this, we propose HARP, a human-robot aligned representation learning framework for more effective VLA pretraining from human videos. Specifically, HARP uses limited paired human-robot demonstrations as cross-embodiment bridges and abundant unpaired human and robot videos as a scalable dynamics supervision data source. It trains a robot-adapted visual encoder and a latent action model with manipulation-centric auxiliary cues and a source-relative pair-discriminative alignment loss, which adapts robot representations toward human semantics while preserving pair-level discrimination. The learned aligned vision encoder and latent action model provide a unified vision and action representation for VLA-style policy learning, where human and robot videos provide vision-language-to-latent-action supervision and a lightweight robot action head grounds latent actions into executable commands. Experiments on feature visualization, simulation, and realworld manipulation show improved human-robot alignment and downstream policy performance, achieving 4.481 average length on CALVIN ABCrightarrowD and a 7.1\% realworld success rate gain over the strongest baseline.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28

Skeleton-Grounded Latent Action Model for Robot World Models

Robot world models simulate how environments evolve in response to robot actions. Latent action models enable learning dynamics from videos by encoding visual transitions as proxy actions. However, reconstruction-driven latent actions mix robot motion with object responses and other scene changes, complicating their correspondence with robot controls. We propose SkeLAM, a skeleton-guided latent action model for controllable robot world modeling. SkeLAM decomposes latent actions into a kinematic component grounded by robot skeleton supervision and a residual component retaining complementary visual dynamics. Cross-modal swap reconstruction encourages RGB-derived and skeleton-derived kinematic representations to be interchangeable during video reconstruction. The world model incorporates both components through separate conditioning pathways, while branch dropout reduces its dependence on future-derived residual information. A lightweight adapter maps robot actions to the kinematic space, and subsequent world-model fine-tuning adapts generation to these predicted conditions. At inference, the model generates future observations from the current observation and robot actions. On DROID, SkeLAM reduces end-effector ADE by 19.5% and LPIPS by 11.1% compared with DreamDojo. Motion probing supports kinematic specialization, while qualitative results demonstrate zero-shot human-to-robot motion transfer in generated rollouts. Policy evaluation shows agreement between predicted success rates and those measured in real robot executions.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 21 2

Unified Video Action Model

A unified video and action model holds significant promise for robotics, where videos provide rich scene information for action prediction, and actions provide dynamics information for video prediction. However, effectively combining video generation and action prediction remains challenging, and current video generation-based methods struggle to match the performance of direct policy learning in action accuracy and inference speed. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified Video Action model (UVA), which jointly optimizes video and action predictions to achieve both high accuracy and efficient action inference. The key lies in learning a joint video-action latent representation and decoupling video-action decoding. The joint latent representation bridges the visual and action domains, effectively modeling the relationship between video and action sequences. Meanwhile, the decoupled decoding, powered by two lightweight diffusion heads, enables high-speed action inference by bypassing video generation during inference. Such a unified framework further enables versatile functionality through masked input training. By selectively masking actions or videos, a single model can tackle diverse tasks beyond policy learning, such as forward and inverse dynamics modeling and video generation. Via an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that UVA can serve as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of robotics tasks, such as policy learning, forward/inverse dynamics and video observation prediction, without compromising performance compared to methods tailored for specific applications. Results are best viewed on https://unified-video-action-model.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025 2

LDA-1B: Scaling Latent Dynamics Action Model via Universal Embodied Data Ingestion

Recent robot foundation models largely rely on large-scale behavior cloning, which imitates expert actions but discards transferable dynamics knowledge embedded in heterogeneous embodied data. While the Unified World Model (UWM) formulation has the potential to leverage such diverse data, existing instantiations struggle to scale to foundation-level due to coarse data usage and fragmented datasets. We introduce LDA-1B, a robot foundation model that scales through universal embodied data ingestion by jointly learning dynamics, policy, and visual forecasting, assigning distinct roles to data of varying quality. To support this regime at scale, we assemble and standardize EI-30k, an embodied interaction dataset comprising over 30k hours of human and robot trajectories in a unified format. Scalable dynamics learning over such heterogeneous data is enabled by prediction in a structured DINO latent space, which avoids redundant pixel-space appearance modeling. Complementing this representation, LDA-1B employs a multi-modal diffusion transformer to handle asynchronous vision and action streams, enabling stable training at the 1B-parameter scale. Experiments in simulation and the real world show LDA-1B outperforms prior methods (e.g., π_{0.5}) by up to 21\%, 48\%, and 23\% on contact-rich, dexterous, and long-horizon tasks, respectively. Notably, LDA-1B enables data-efficient fine-tuning, gaining 10\% by leveraging 30\% low-quality trajectories typically harmful and discarded.

  • 23 authors
·
Feb 12

AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage the rich world knowledge of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to enable instruction-following robotic manipulation. However, the structural mismatch between VLM semantic spaces and embodied control policies often hinders the learning of precise perception-action mappings. To address this challenge, we propose AffordanceVLA, a scalable, unified framework that introduces structured affordance learning as a task-oriented and object-centric intermediate representation to establish a more precise and robust perception-action mapping. Specifically, we progressively model manipulation priors through three complementary components - Which2Act, Where2Act, and How2Act - which jointly produce spatially grounded, semantically conditioned, and action-coupled intermediate representations, thereby naturally bridging vision, language, and action. We integrate these modules into a Mixture-of-Transformer (MoT) architecture and adopt a three-stage progressive training curriculum that leverages 8.8M affordance-centric grounding and pointing samples, translating scalable vision-language supervision into improved robotic manipulation. To overcome the scarcity of dense affordance labels in robotic datasets, we also develop a robust automated data augmentation pipeline. Extensive experiments on ID & OOD simulation and real-world demonstrate that AffordanceVLA outperforms strong VLA baselines across diverse manipulation scenarios, validating structured affordance learning as a scalable and robust bridge that integrates multi-source vision-language supervision while connecting pretrained VLM semantics to embodied robot control.

RotVLA: Rotational Latent Action for Vision-Language-Action Model

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as an effective paradigm for handling heterogeneous datasets during Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pretraining, offering a unified action space across embodiments. However, existing LAMs often rely on discrete quantization encode and decode pipelines, which can lead to trivial frame reconstruction behavior, limited representational capacity, and a lack of physically meaningful structure. We introduce RotVLA, a VLA framework built on a continuous rotational latent action representation. Latent actions are modeled as elements of SO(n), providing continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry aligned with real-world action dynamics. A triplet frame learning framework further enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while avoiding degeneration. RotVLA consists of a VLM backbone and a flow-matching action head, pretrained on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets and human videos with latent-action supervision. For downstream robot control, the flow-matching head is extended into a unified action expert that jointly denoises latent and robot actions. Here, latent actions serve as a latent planner, providing high-level guidance that conditions action generation. With only 1.7B parameters and 1700+ hours of pretraining data, RotVLA achieves 98.2% on LIBERO and 89.6% / 88.5% on RoboTwin2.0 under clean and randomized settings, respectively. It also demonstrates strong real-world performance on manipulation tasks, consistently outperforming existing VLA models.

  • 8 authors
·
May 12

GameWAM: A World Action Model for Video Games

Modern video games combine first-person perception, rapid visual changes, persistent world state, and heterogeneous native controls. Existing game agents map visual and task context directly to actions but lack explicit world dynamics modeling, whereas interactive game world models predict visual futures from supplied actions but do not serve as task policies. World-Action Models (WAMs) unify these objectives, but remain largely unexplored under the dynamics and open-ended interaction of video games. We introduce GameWAM, to our knowledge the first WAM for native closed-loop gameplay and GUI control. GameWAM jointly generates future visual observations and executable keyboard-mouse trajectories through parallel visual and action generative processes with block-causal conditioning and flow matching. To support joint world-action learning, we construct synchronized gameplay and GUI trajectories. To handle heterogeneous native control, GameWAM predicts a gameplay/GUI mode at each action step and generates actions with mode-specific prediction distributions and continuous-action normalization. For long-horizon interaction, block-cycle control predicts beyond the committed horizon, executes only a short action prefix, and replans from new observations, while fine-grained within-cycle context and hierarchical cross-cycle history preserve temporal continuity. Experiments demonstrate competitive task success with fewer executed native actions than the compared agents. We further uncover Low-Frequency Action Source Imprinting (LASI), in which low-frequency components of the sampled action source systematically steer coarse generated camera motion under fixed conditioning, revealing a source-sensitivity failure mode in generative control. Project page is available at https://yunncheng.github.io/GameWAM/.

tencent Tencent
·
Aug 24 2

Latent evolving World Action Model

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model action generation and environment dynamics and are mostly built on pretrained Video Diffusion Models (VDMs). In VDM-based WAMs, observations are first encoded by a VAE, and the resulting compressed latents are then processed by large video diffusion backbones to extract effective features for action generation. However, this paradigm ties WAM performance and training cost to large-scale video generation pretraining, limiting WAM efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically investigate how visual representations affect action generation in WAMs. Our results show that predictive embeddings from Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) encoders better support action generation than compressed VAE latents, with I-JEPA performing best in our encoder comparison. Based on these findings, we propose LeWAM, which conditions action generation on JEPA embeddings and models environment evolution by predicting future embeddings in the same space, without relying on a video diffusion backbone. We further find that imitation learning matches demonstrated actions but does not distinguish better actions from worse ones, even though small action deviations can greatly affect task success. To address this limitation without additional environment interaction or the human oversight required for resets and safety, we introduce Demonstration-Guided DPO (DemoDPO), an offline preference refinement stage that derives preference supervision directly from demonstrations.With only 0.4B trainable parameters, LeWAM achieves an average success rate of 92.28\% on RoboTwin 2.0, comparable to that of state-of-the-art VLAs and WAMs, and maintains practical effectiveness on real-world manipulation tasks.

Scaling Offline Model-Based RL via Jointly-Optimized World-Action Model Pretraining

A significant aspiration of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to develop a generalist agent with high capabilities from large and heterogeneous datasets. However, prior approaches that scale offline RL either rely heavily on expert trajectories or struggle to generalize to diverse unseen tasks. Inspired by the excellent generalization of world model in conditional video generation, we explore the potential of image observation-based world model for scaling offline RL and enhancing generalization on novel tasks. In this paper, we introduce JOWA: Jointly-Optimized World-Action model, an offline model-based RL agent pretrained on multiple Atari games with 6 billion tokens data to learn general-purpose representation and decision-making ability. Our method jointly optimizes a world-action model through a shared transformer backbone, which stabilize temporal difference learning with large models during pretraining. Moreover, we propose a provably efficient and parallelizable planning algorithm to compensate for the Q-value estimation error and thus search out better policies. Experimental results indicate that our largest agent, with 150 million parameters, achieves 78.9% human-level performance on pretrained games using only 10% subsampled offline data, outperforming existing state-of-the-art large-scale offline RL baselines by 31.6% on averange. Furthermore, JOWA scales favorably with model capacity and can sample-efficiently transfer to novel games using only 5k offline fine-tuning data (approximately 4 trajectories) per game, demonstrating superior generalization. We will release codes and model weights at https://github.com/CJReinforce/JOWA

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

HALO: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but often struggle in long-horizon or out-of-distribution scenarios due to the lack of explicit mechanisms for multimodal reasoning and anticipating how the world will evolve under action. Recent works introduce textual chain-of-thought or visual subgoal prediction within VLA models to reason, but still fail to offer a unified human-like reasoning framework for joint textual reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction. To this end, we propose HALO, a unified VLA model that enables embodied multimodal chain-of-thought (EM-CoT) reasoning through a sequential process of textual task reasoning, visual subgoal prediction for fine-grained guidance, and EM-CoT-augmented action prediction. We instantiate HALO with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that decouples semantic reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction into specialized experts while allowing seamless cross-expert collaboration. To enable HALO learning at scale, we introduce an automated pipeline to synthesize EM-CoT training data along with a carefully crafted training recipe. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) HALO achieves superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments, surpassing baseline policy pi_0 by 34.1% on RoboTwin benchmark; (2) all proposed components of the training recipe and EM-CoT design help improve task success rate; and (3) HALO exhibits strong generalization capabilities under aggressive unseen environmental randomization with our proposed EM-CoT reasoning.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 24

DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning

Recently, world-action models (WAM) have emerged to bridge vision-language-action (VLA) models and world models, unifying their reasoning and instruction-following capabilities and spatio-temporal world modeling. However, existing WAM approaches often focus on modeling 2D appearance or latent representations, with limited geometric grounding-an essential element for embodied systems operating in the physical world. We present DriveDreamer-Policy, a unified driving world-action model that integrates depth generation, future video generation, and motion planning within a single modular architecture. The model employs a large language model to process language instructions, multi-view images, and actions, followed by three lightweight generators that produce depth, future video, and actions. By learning a geometry-aware world representation and using it to guide both future prediction and planning within a unified framework, the proposed model produces more coherent imagined futures and more informed driving actions, while maintaining modularity and controllable latency. Experiments on the Navsim v1 and v2 benchmarks demonstrate that DriveDreamer-Policy achieves strong performance on both closed-loop planning and world generation tasks. In particular, our model reaches 89.2 PDMS on Navsim v1 and 88.7 EPDMS on Navsim v2, outperforming existing world-model-based approaches while producing higher-quality future video and depth predictions. Ablation studies further show that explicit depth learning provides complementary benefits to video imagination and improves planning robustness.

WSA$_1$: a 3D-Centric World-Spatial-Action Model for Generalizable Robot Control

Recent advances in embodied AI have established robot foundation models (RFMs) as the dominant approach for generalist robotic systems to date. By leveraging imitation learning on extensive robot demonstrations, RFMs have achieved impressive capabilities in mapping visual observations and language instructions to continuous robotic actions. However, current RFMs lack an inherent ability to reason about physical dynamics and the causal effects of robot behaviors on the 3D physical world. This creates a fundamental mismatch between 2D-centric visual perception and 3D-centric embodied interaction, severely limiting the generalization ability of RFMs in real-world tasks.To address this gap, we present WSA_1, a novel RFM built upon proposed 3D-Centric World-Spatial-Action modeling paradigm. It not only learns 3D world-aware visual thought for future robot behaviors, but also models mutual constraints between 3D world state transitions and robotic actions to enhance behavior generalization. Notably, WSA_1 achieves highly data-efficient pre-training with 6k hours of expert demonstration data (only 1k hours from real robot), while delivering competitive manipulation performance (93% success rate) on RoboTwin2.0 simulation benchmark and achieving +20% average boosted performance over state-of-the-art RFMs on real-world robot control tasks. These results reveal that generalizable RFM can be attained without large-scale real robot data when paired with 3D-centric world-action joint modeling, which offers a practical and affordable pathway to generalist robotic systems.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 3

Causally Debiased Latent Action Model for Embodied Action Conditioned World Models

Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions, offering a promising foundation for robot planning, policy evaluation, and data augmentation. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect in the real world. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from unlabeled videos, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual factors such as backgrounds and untouched objects. In this work, we identify this action-irrelevant bias as a key obstacle to controllable ACWMs and introduce evaluation metrics to measure latent-action bias, action following, and robustness. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three efficient fine-tuning objectives: embodiment-centric reconstruction, action-centric contrastive learning, and latent space calibration, which together encourage embodiment-focused, action-aware, and calibrated non-collapsed latent action representations. Experiments on 2B and 14B ACWM backbones show that CD-LAM substantially improves latent-action controllability, downstream robot-action following, visual fidelity, and adaptation efficiency, requiring only 6k fine-tuning steps and more than 12times fewer robot-action adaptation updates than the baseline.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 9

GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents

Existing efforts in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents largely rely on the training paradigm of supervised fine-tuning on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, this approach not only demands extensive amounts of training data but also struggles to effectively understand GUI screenshots and generalize to unseen interfaces. The issue significantly limits its application in real-world scenarios, especially for high-level tasks. Inspired by Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), which efficiently enhances the problem-solving capabilities of large language models in real-world settings, we propose \name, the first reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the GUI capabilities of LVLMs in high-level real-world task scenarios, through unified action space rule modeling. By leveraging a small amount of carefully curated high-quality data across multiple platforms (including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and Web) and employing policy optimization algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update the model, \name achieves superior performance using only 0.02\% of the data (3K vs. 13M) compared to previous state-of-the-art methods like OS-Atlas across eight benchmarks spanning three different platforms (mobile, desktop, and web). These results demonstrate the immense potential of reinforcement learning based on unified action space rule modeling in improving the execution capabilities of LVLMs for real-world GUI agent tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action

World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm

  • 6 authors
·
May 7 2

GALA: Geometry-Aware Latent Action Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Model Pretraining across Embodiments

Learning large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models from multi-embodiment datasets remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces across end effectors. Although latent action models (LAMs) can learn embodiment-agnostic action representations from diverse video data, existing image-based LAMs often fail to capture fine-grained end-effector articulation, particularly finger-level geometric changes in human and dexterous robot hands. To address this limitation, we propose GALA, a Geometry-Aware Latent-Action modeling framework that augments image-based latent actions with 3D end-effector geometric motion. However, naively incorporating point clouds yields fine-grained action representations with limited shared semantics, hindering cross-embodiment pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce the Unified End-effector Motion Representation (UEMR), which preserves fine-grained motion information while improving the cross-embodiment generalizability of latent actions. Building upon UEMR, GALA combines visual latent actions that capture scene-level dynamics with geometric latent actions that capture shared fine-grained end-effector articulation, providing effective supervision for VLA pretraining from multi-embodiment data, including action-free ego-centric human videos. Experiments on fine-grained motion probing, cross-embodiment retrieval, and downstream VLA evaluation demonstrate GALA's effectiveness in modeling generalizable fine-grained motions across embodiments, achieving 68.3% RoboCasa-GR1 success rate and 75.5% real-world success rate. Code, appendix, and demos are available at https://puzhenyuan.github.io/GALA-website/.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17

Rethinking World-Action Model for Compositional and In-Context Robotic Manipulation

Long-horizon compositional manipulation has become increasingly important for real-world robot deployment, where a single task involves multiple coordinated subtasks. Existing world-action models (WAMs) jointly predict short-horizon visual futures and actions, but typically lack explicit subtask-level reasoning. We propose Visual Goal-conditioned Action Reasoning (ViGAR), a hierarchical framework that factorizes manipulation into a visual subgoal planner and a subgoal executor. Given the current observation and global instruction, the subgoal planner predicts a visual subgoal for the next subtask. The subgoal executor then jointly generates future visual trajectories and actions conditioned on the predicted subgoal. Both components share a pretrained world-model representation, enabling task-level planning and action generation to benefit from common physical knowledge. Moreover, our framework naturally supports in-context learning: using a global goal image as context can induce different subtask decompositions and behaviors without parameter updates. On the RoboTwin Clean2Random benchmark, ViGAR achieves 82.00% and 67.02% success rates under the Clean and Random settings, respectively, surpassing the strongest baseline by 12.86 percentage points in average success rate. Real-world robot experiments on five compositional and two in-context learning tasks further confirm the effectiveness of ViGAR.

DAGroup-PKU DAGroup-PKU
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Sep 30 2

HAMLET: Switch your Vision-Language-Action Model into a History-Aware Policy

Inherently, robotic manipulation tasks are history-dependent: leveraging past context could be beneficial. However, most existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have been designed without considering this aspect, i.e., they rely solely on the current observation, ignoring preceding context. In this paper, we propose HAMLET, a scalable framework to adapt VLAs to attend to the historical context during action prediction. Specifically, we introduce moment tokens that compactly encode perceptual information at each timestep. Their representations are initialized with time-contrastive learning, allowing them to better capture temporally distinctive aspects. Next, we employ a lightweight memory module that integrates the moment tokens across past timesteps into memory features, which are then leveraged for action prediction. Through empirical evaluation, we show that HAMLET successfully transforms a state-of-the-art VLA into a history-aware policy, especially demonstrating significant improvements on long-horizon tasks that require historical context. In particular, on top of GR00T N1.5, HAMLET achieves an average success rate of 76.4% on history-dependent real-world tasks, surpassing the baseline performance by 47.2%. Furthermore, HAMLET pushes prior art performance from 64.1% to 66.4% on RoboCasa Kitchen (100-demo setup) and from 95.6% to 97.7% on LIBERO, highlighting its effectiveness even under generic robot-manipulation benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Benchmarking World-Model Learning

Model-learning agents should gather information to learn world models that support many downstream tasks and inferences, such as predicting unobserved states, estimating near- and far-term consequences of actions, planning action sequences, and detecting changes in dynamics. Current methods for learning and evaluating world models diverge from this goal: training and evaluation are anchored to next-frame prediction, and success is scored by reward maximization in the same environment. We propose WorldTest, a protocol to evaluate model-learning agents that separates reward-free interaction from a scored test phase in a different but related environment. WorldTest is open-endedx2014models should support many different tasks unknown ahead of timex2014and agnostic to model representation, allowing comparison across approaches. We instantiated WorldTest with AutumnBench, a suite of 43 interactive grid-world environments and 129 tasks across three families: masked-frame prediction, planning, and predicting changes to the causal dynamics. We compared 517 human participants and three frontier models on AutumnBench. We found that humans outperform the models, and scaling compute improves performance only in some environments but not others. WorldTest provides a novel templatex2014reward-free exploration, derived tests, and behavior-based scoringx2014to evaluate what agents learn about environment dynamics, and AutumnBench exposes significant headroom in world-model learning.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025

VAMOS: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Model for Capability-Modulated and Steerable Navigation

A fundamental challenge in robot navigation lies in learning policies that generalize across diverse environments while conforming to the unique physical constraints and capabilities of a specific embodiment (e.g., quadrupeds can walk up stairs, but rovers cannot). We propose VAMOS, a hierarchical VLA that decouples semantic planning from embodiment grounding: a generalist planner learns from diverse, open-world data, while a specialist affordance model learns the robot's physical constraints and capabilities in safe, low-cost simulation. We enabled this separation by carefully designing an interface that lets a high-level planner propose candidate paths directly in image space that the affordance model then evaluates and re-ranks. Our real-world experiments show that VAMOS achieves higher success rates in both indoor and complex outdoor navigation than state-of-the-art model-based and end-to-end learning methods. We also show that our hierarchical design enables cross-embodied navigation across legged and wheeled robots and is easily steerable using natural language. Real-world ablations confirm that the specialist model is key to embodiment grounding, enabling a single high-level planner to be deployed across physically distinct wheeled and legged robots. Finally, this model significantly enhances single-robot reliability, achieving 3X higher success rates by rejecting physically infeasible plans. Website: https://vamos-vla.github.io/

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

ALOE: Action-Level Off-Policy Evaluation for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training

We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world settings. Central to this process is the value function, which provides learning signals to guide VLA learning from experience. In practice, the value function is estimated from trajectory fragments collected from different data sources, including historical policies and intermittent human interventions. Estimating the value function of current behavior quality from the mixture data is inherently an off-policy evaluation problem. However, prior work often adopts conservative on-policy estimation for stability, which avoids direct evaluation of the current high-capacity policy and limits learning effectiveness. In this paper, we propose ALOE, an action-level off-policy evaluation framework for VLA post-training. ALOE applies chunking-based temporal-difference bootstrapping to evaluate individual action sequences instead of predicting final task outcomes. This design improves effective credit assignment to critical action chunks under sparse rewards and supports stable policy improvement. We evaluate our method on three real-world manipulation tasks, including smartphone packing as a high-precision task, laundry folding as a long-horizon deformable-object task, and bimanual pick-and-place involving multi-object perception. Across all tasks, ALOE improves learning efficiency without compromising execution speed, showing that off-policy RL can be reintroduced in a reliable manner for real-world VLA post-training. Videos and additional materials are available at our project website.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 13

GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.

open-gigaai GigaAI
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Mar 17 2

ChatVLA-2: Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Embodied Reasoning from Pretrained Knowledge

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as the next generation of models in robotics. However, despite leveraging powerful pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), existing end-to-end VLA systems often lose key capabilities during fine-tuning as the model adapts to specific robotic tasks. We argue that a generalizable VLA model should retain and expand upon the VLM's core competencies: 1) Open-world embodied reasoning - the VLA should inherit the knowledge from VLM, i.e., recognize anything that the VLM can recognize, be capable of solving math problems, and possess visual-spatial intelligence, 2) Reasoning following - effectively translating the open-world reasoning into actionable steps for the robot. In this work, we introduce ChatVLA-2, a novel mixture-of-expert VLA model coupled with a specialized two-stage training pipeline designed to preserve the VLM's original strengths while enabling actionable reasoning. To validate our approach, we design a math-matching task wherein a robot interprets math problems written on a whiteboard and picks corresponding number cards from a table to solve equations. Remarkably, our method exhibits exceptional mathematical reasoning and OCR capabilities, despite these abilities not being explicitly trained within the VLA. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the VLA possesses strong spatial reasoning skills, enabling it to interpret novel directional instructions involving previously unseen objects. Overall, our method showcases reasoning and comprehension abilities that significantly surpass state-of-the-art imitation learning methods such as OpenVLA, DexVLA, and pi-zero. This work represents a substantial advancement toward developing truly generalizable robotic foundation models endowed with robust reasoning capacities.

  • 5 authors
·
May 27, 2025

MLA: A Multisensory Language-Action Model for Multimodal Understanding and Forecasting in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/open-mla

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025

Learning to Accelerate Vision-Language-Action Models through Adaptive Visual Token Caching

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks, yet their substantial computational overhead remains a critical obstacle to real-world deployment. Improving inference efficiency is therefore essential for practical robotic applications. Existing acceleration methods often rely on heuristic or static strategies--such as rule-based token caching or pruning--that are decoupled from task objectives and fail to adapt to dynamic scene changes. In this work, we reformulate inference acceleration as a learnable policy optimization problem and propose a novel framework that integrates a dynamic, task-aware decision-making process directly into the VLA model. At its core are two lightweight, cooperative modules: a Cached Token Selector, which determines which tokens should be reused, and a Cache Ratio Predictor, which controls how many tokens to reuse. Training these modules is non-trivial due to their discrete decisions. We address this by adopting a differentiable relaxation that allows gradient-based end-to-end optimization. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO and SIMPLER benchmarks, as well as real-robot evaluations, show that our method achieves a 1.76x wall-clock inference speedup while simultaneously improving the average success rate by 1.9 percentage points (from 75.0% to 76.9%) on LIBERO and by 5.0 percentage points on real-world tasks, significantly outperforming existing baselines. This work highlights the potential of learning task-aware computational allocation policies, paving the way for VLA models that are both powerful and efficient.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 31

Developing Vision-Language-Action Model from Egocentric Videos

Egocentric videos capture how humans manipulate objects and tools, providing diverse motion cues for learning object manipulation. Unlike the costly, expert-driven manual teleoperation commonly used in training Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), egocentric videos offer a scalable alternative. However, prior studies that leverage such videos for training robot policies typically rely on auxiliary annotations, such as detailed hand-pose recordings. Consequently, it remains unclear whether VLAs can be trained directly from raw egocentric videos. In this work, we address this challenge by leveraging EgoScaler, a framework that extracts 6DoF object manipulation trajectories from egocentric videos without requiring auxiliary recordings. We apply EgoScaler to four large-scale egocentric video datasets and automatically refine noisy or incomplete trajectories, thereby constructing a new large-scale dataset for VLA pre-training. Our experiments with a state-of-the-art π_0 architecture in both simulated and real-robot environments yield three key findings: (i) pre-training on our dataset improves task success rates by over 20\% compared to training from scratch, (ii) the performance is competitive with that achieved using real-robot datasets, and (iii) combining our dataset with real-robot data yields further improvements. These results demonstrate that egocentric videos constitute a promising and scalable resource for advancing VLA research.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

World-Language-Action Model for Unified World Modeling, Language Reasoning, and Action Synthesis

We propose world-language-action (WLA) models as a new class of embodied foundation models. WLA takes textual instructions, images, and robot states as inputs to jointly predict textual subtasks, subgoal images, and robot actions, conjoining the world modeling interface to learn from extensive egocentric videos as in the world-action model (WAM) and the language reasoning capacities to solve complex long-horizon tasks as in vision-language-action (VLA) models. At the core of WLA lies an autoregressive (AR) Transformer backbone, instead of a bidirectional diffusion Transformer as in WAMs, to predict the next state, comprising the semantic-level textual intention and complementary fine-grained physical dynamics. The physical dynamics are supervised by the world modeling objective based on a dedicated World Expert, and are leveraged to ease the characterization of the state-action correlation for the Action Expert. WLA leverages meta-queries to make the world prediction implicitly impact the action generation so that the former can be disabled during inference. The world prediction can also be activated to enable test-time scaling for improved robot control. Our WLA-0 prototype, with 2B active parameters, achieves 40 ms per inference on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. Evaluations across simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that WLA-0 achieves state-of-the-art multi-task and long-horizon learning abilities, e.g., 92.94\% success rate on RoboTwin2.0 Clean and 56.5\% success rate on RMBench. WLA-0 also holds the promise to learn novel tasks directly from cross-embodiment robot videos without action annotations.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 3 1

SOS! Self-supervised Learning Over Sets Of Handled Objects In Egocentric Action Recognition

Learning an egocentric action recognition model from video data is challenging due to distractors (e.g., irrelevant objects) in the background. Further integrating object information into an action model is hence beneficial. Existing methods often leverage a generic object detector to identify and represent the objects in the scene. However, several important issues remain. Object class annotations of good quality for the target domain (dataset) are still required for learning good object representation. Besides, previous methods deeply couple the existing action models and need to retrain them jointly with object representation, leading to costly and inflexible integration. To overcome both limitations, we introduce Self-Supervised Learning Over Sets (SOS), an approach to pre-train a generic Objects In Contact (OIC) representation model from video object regions detected by an off-the-shelf hand-object contact detector. Instead of augmenting object regions individually as in conventional self-supervised learning, we view the action process as a means of natural data transformations with unique spatio-temporal continuity and exploit the inherent relationships among per-video object sets. Extensive experiments on two datasets, EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA, show that our OIC significantly boosts the performance of multiple state-of-the-art video classification models.

  • 4 authors
·
May 1, 2022

JoyAI-RA 0.5: Scaling Robot Manipulation Learning via Dual Action Alignment

Robot data is scarce, so generalist policies need to learn from heterogeneous sources, including human egocentric video, simulation, and real robots, which differ in supervision and embodiment, with action labels missing or mutually incompatible. Human egocentric data scale best but sit farthest from robot data, and naive pooling causes negative transfer rather than knowledge sharing. We propose JoyAI-RA 0.5, a generalist Vision-Language-World-Action (VLWA) framework that couples physical world-dynamics priors with visual semantics and scales manipulation learning across such data via dual action alignment. Implicit action alignment infers latent actions from visual transitions, enabling action-free human, simulation, and robot data to guide a latent-action-conditioned world model in learning physical dynamics. Explicit alignment grounds reliable human and robot trajectories in a unified physical action space through a canonical action representation and camera-frame chunk-relative end-effector actions. An inner-outer-loop reinforcement stage then pairs efficient task adaptation with foundation-policy improvement. On a real-world AgiBot benchmark, JoyAI-RA performs strongly on both seen tasks and unseen variations. The task score improves consistently as the volume of human egocentric pretraining data increases and shows no sign of plateauing at our largest scale. This suggests that abundant but weakly labeled human experience can be converted into a transferable training signal, making human video not merely a weak auxiliary source but a primary axis along which manipulation capability can be scaled. Project page can be found at https://joyai-ra-05.github.io/.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 5

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

Dynamic target tracking is essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in complex urban environments, where both the target and the camera viewpoint change continuously. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies can track visible targets effectively, but their performance often degrades when buildings, vegetation, or roadside objects block the line of sight. During sustained occlusion, a policy may lose the target state, execute actions toward an incorrect region, and amplify this error through subsequent observations until re-acquisition becomes impossible. To this end, we present CosFly-VLA, a spatially aware VLA model that jointly grounds the target, estimates its visibility, and generates continuous flight actions through a structured prediction interface. To train this policy, we use a large-scale recipe over diverse data sources. Spatially Grounded Continued Pretraining (CPT) on a 500k mixed pool injects UAV-view depth, distance, and 3-D spatial reasoning. A three-stage Curriculum-based Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process then specializes the tracker through multi-head warm-up followed by two-stage curriculum learning over natural and hard / long-occlusion data. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training subsequently teaches recovery-oriented reasoning traces before structured answers. Finally, a closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage optimizes tracking behavior with a multi-component reward covering stand-off tracking, grounding quality, collision avoidance, and task success. Relative to OpenVLA, CosFly-VLA-0.8B reduces open-loop Average Displacement Error (ADE) by 34.1% on seen-test and 35.3% on unseen-test. Closed-loop optimization improves Success Rate (SR) by 29.8% and 2.5%, respectively. These results demonstrate progress from visible-frame imitation toward spatially grounded action-closed-loop control, evaluated under a shared oracle state history.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 15

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Visual goal and dynamics prediction can provide language-conditioned robot policies with both a target outcome and a representation of action-dependent scene changes. We bring these predictions into action generation and selection through a shared trajectory model. Dynin-Robotics implements this formulation on Dynin-Omni, an omnimodal masked-diffusion backbone, representing language, visual observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. By varying conditioning and target spans, the same model learns action prediction, action-conditioned next-observation prediction, terminal goal-state prediction, and trajectory-to-instruction reconstruction. These interfaces support test-time scaling through goal prediction, action-candidate evaluation, and joint refinement of action and future-state predictions. We continually pretrain the model on approximately 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X-Embodiment datasets and adapt it separately to downstream domains. On two VLABench tasks, robot pretraining improves adaptation within a fixed Stage-2 step budget, and the full objective mixture improves shifted-instruction success over Policy-only post-training under the same coupled decoder. Combining goal guidance with joint action-next-state denoising further improves shifted-instruction success over action-only decoding; the benefit depends on how the predictions are composed. Dynin-Robotics achieves competitive performance on LIBERO and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, together with a 78.4% average success rate across four manipulation conditions on a Franka Research 3 robot. An optimized block-parallel implementation accelerates model-side action decoding by up to 29.2x relative to the base implementation under the reported profiling setup. These results support shared trajectory modeling as a common interface for learning complementary robot objectives and composing their predictions during control.

snu-aidas AIDAS Lab
·
Sep 10 2

SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

World models (WMs) have demonstrated strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by learning predictive representations of future scene dynamics. However, generating future videos during inference introduces substantial computational overhead, leading many recent driving WMs to adopt a single front camera as input for efficient deployment. This design restricts spatial coverage in safety-critical maneuvers such as lane changes, merges, and turns. To address this limitation, we propose SV-WAM, a surround-view world-action model (WAM) that preserves full six-camera observations while maintaining efficient inference. SV-WAM leverages future-video prediction as dense training supervision for action learning within a shared generative model, rather than as an inference-time output. At the core of this design is an action-centered causal mask that prevents action tokens from attending to future-video tokens during joint action-video denoising. Consequently, the video branch can be discarded at deployment, enabling efficient action-only planning. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable drivable-area compliance regularizer that penalizes vehicle-footprint corners approaching or crossing drivable boundaries, improving planning safety and boundary awareness. Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIMv2 benchmark and the open-loop nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that SV-WAM achieves state-of-the-art planning performance with low inference latency and competitive zero-shot transfer capability.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 2

Skel-WAM: A Hand-Skeleton-Conditioned World Action Model for Human-to-Robot Manipulation Transfer

Robot demonstrations are expensive to collect and often provide limited distributional coverage of task variations. Human videos offer a low-cost source of complementary manipulation experience, but learning from them requires bridging embodiment gaps in visual appearance and action spaces. We introduce Skel-WAM, a world action model that bridges these differences through a unified hand-skeleton motion interface. The key insight is to align human and robot motion through a common hand topology, combining skeleton overlays that ground motion in the scene with structured 2.5-D keypoints that encode explicit hand kinematics. Video and Keypoint Experts jointly learn visual and skeletal dynamics through a Mixture-of-Transformers, while a separate robot-trained Action Expert maps these predictions to executable controls. This separation enables human and robot demonstrations to directly supervise shared dynamics without requiring robot action labels for human videos. Across four real-world bimanual tasks and seven simulated tasks, Skel-WAM achieves average success rates of 79.86% and 63.29%, surpassing the strongest baseline by 22.22 and 8.28 percentage points, respectively. Human-robot cotraining more than doubles real-world success on task variations absent from robot training data, from 38.89% to 86.11%. These results demonstrate that a shared skeletal interface enables joint learning across human and robot data and expands robot task coverage through complementary human demonstrations.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 17

US-VLA: An Ultrasound Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Abdomina

Artificial intelligence-assisted ultrasound scanning enhances diagnostic reliability and efficiency by providing real-time guidance for standardized image acquisition and reducing operator dependence. However, existing reinforcement learning and learning-assisted ultrasound scanning methods typically rely on carefully designed reward functions or extensive interaction data, which limits their generalization ability and stability across different devices, patient populations, and complex clinical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an ultrasound vision-language-action model (US-VLA) for automated ultrasound scanning that explicitly encodes clinical semantic goals and generates sequential probe manipulation actions under real-time ultrasound feedback. In particular, we first design an ultrasound-aware expert fusion module to jointly integrate ultrasound observations with auxiliary contextual information, enabling semantic ultrasound feedback to effectively guide the scanning process. Then, we construct US-VLA-Data, a real-world dataset covering liver and kidney examinations, which includes five clinically defined standard planes and comprises 320 expert scanning trajectories with approximately 80,000 synchronized timesteps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that US-VLA achieves competitive performance in ultrasound probe manipulation tasks, indicating its effectiveness and promising generalization within the evaluated abdominal ultrasound setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/VMVLab/US-VLA.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 16

Latent World Action Model for GUI Agents

Pixel-space world models have recently emerged as a promising approach for GUI agents, predicting future screens prior to execution and subsequently re-perceiving them for action selection. However, this two-stage paradigm faces two key challenges in GUI environments: (L1) the high computational cost of pixel reconstruction and (L2) the need to reconstruct large and diverse appearance-level details beyond what is required for action selection. In practice, this screen-generation objective can induce an identity shortcut problem, where future-state prediction largely preserves the current state rather than capturing action-induced changes. In this work, we reformulate GUI world modeling by shifting the prediction target from full-screen reconstruction to action-induced future information in latent space. Concretely, we leverage a large multimodal model as the latent world model, whose shared representations support two dedicated heads for both action selection and predictive transition modeling. The action head directly translates these latent representations into action selection, while the transition head captures action-conditioned future information. To mitigate the identity shortcut, we further introduce an action-aware contrastive objective that encourages the transition representations to capture discriminative action-induced changes. Extensive experiments across offline and online GUI settings show that our method achieves up to 31.9% and 40.6% relative gains in success rate over pixel-space world models, respectively, while substantially reducing inference latency by up to 98.9%. Our code is available at https://github.com/sjyu001/latent2world.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
Oct 8 2

OG-VLA: 3D-Aware Vision Language Action Model via Orthographic Image Generation

We introduce OG-VLA, a novel architecture and learning framework that combines the generalization strengths of Vision Language Action models (VLAs) with the robustness of 3D-aware policies. We address the challenge of mapping natural language instructions and multi-view RGBD observations to quasi-static robot actions. 3D-aware robot policies achieve state-of-the-art performance on precise robot manipulation tasks, but struggle with generalization to unseen instructions, scenes, and objects. On the other hand, VLAs excel at generalizing across instructions and scenes, but can be sensitive to camera and robot pose variations. We leverage prior knowledge embedded in language and vision foundation models to improve generalization of 3D-aware keyframe policies. OG-VLA projects input observations from diverse views into a point cloud which is then rendered from canonical orthographic views, ensuring input view invariance and consistency between input and output spaces. These canonical views are processed with a vision backbone, a Large Language Model (LLM), and an image diffusion model to generate images that encode the next position and orientation of the end-effector on the input scene. Evaluations on the Arnold and Colosseum benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generalization to unseen environments, with over 40% relative improvements while maintaining robust performance in seen settings. We also show real-world adaption in 3 to 5 demonstrations along with strong generalization. Videos and resources at https://og-vla.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025

DVGT-2: Vision-Geometry-Action Model for Autonomous Driving at Scale

End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from the conventional paradigm based on sparse perception into vision-language-action (VLA) models, which focus on learning language descriptions as an auxiliary task to facilitate planning. In this paper, we propose an alternative Vision-Geometry-Action (VGA) paradigm that advocates dense 3D geometry as the critical cue for autonomous driving. As vehicles operate in a 3D world, we think dense 3D geometry provides the most comprehensive information for decision-making. However, most existing geometry reconstruction methods (e.g., DVGT) rely on computationally expensive batch processing of multi-frame inputs and cannot be applied to online planning. To address this, we introduce a streaming Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT-2), which processes inputs in an online manner and jointly outputs dense geometry and trajectory planning for the current frame. We employ temporal causal attention and cache historical features to support on-the-fly inference. To further enhance efficiency, we propose a sliding-window streaming strategy and use historical caches within a certain interval to avoid repetitive computations. Despite the faster speed, DVGT-2 achieves superior geometry reconstruction performance on various datasets. The same trained DVGT-2 can be directly applied to planning across diverse camera configurations without fine-tuning, including closed-loop NAVSIM and open-loop nuScenes benchmarks.

  • 9 authors
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Apr 23

WorldVLN: Autoregressive World Action Model for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions through closed-loop perception and action in 3D environments. We argue that aerial VLN can be formulated as a prediction-driven world-action problem: the agent should anticipate latent world evolution and act according to the predicted consequences. To this end, we propose WorldVLN, the first autoregressive world action model for aerial VLN. Unlike full-sequence video-generation world models that generate an entire visual clip, WorldVLN adapts a latent autoregressive video backbone to predict short-horizon world-state transitions and directly decodes them into executable waypoint actions. After each action segment is executed, newly received observations are encoded back into the autoregressive context, enabling closed-loop world-action prediction. We further introduce a two-stage training framework that first grounds the video prior in instruction-conditioned navigation dynamics and then develops Action-aware GRPO, the first reinforcement learning method tailored to autoregressive WAMs, to optimize waypoint decisions through their downstream rollout consequences. On public outdoor and indoor benchmarks, WorldVLN consistently outperforms existing Vision-Language-Action baselines with 12\%+ success-rate gains and larger advantages on challenging cases. It further transfers zero-shot to real drone deployment, suggesting that the proposed WorldVLN offers a promising route for spatial action tasks. Demos and code are available at https://embodiedcity.github.io/WorldVLN/.

  • 16 authors
·
May 14

GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

World-action models (WAM) predict future states to guide robot actions, enabling learning from both action-free video and action-labeled interaction. Most inherit pretrained video generators, leaving WAM pretraining and scaling underexplored. We introduce Genie Envisioner Act 2.0 (GE-Act 2.0), a world-action model whose trainable generative and action components are all initialized from scratch on manipulation data. It combines a control-oriented autoencoder (CoAE), a single-step visual planner (SVP), and an inverse dynamics model (IDM). CoAE retains action- and instruction-relevant information under aggressive compression, while SVP produces a complete future state in one differentiable pass, so visual planning and inverse dynamics can be pretrained separately on complementary data. The components are then jointly trained with knowledge-aligned selective optimization (KASO), which reduces mismatched supervision by selecting only predicted futures judged behaviorally compatible with the recorded action. We evaluate pretrained checkpoints directly, without per-task fine-tuning, on 100 tasks across 20 manipulation skill groups with held-out scenes, backgrounds, lighting, and object instances. Scaling co-training data from 300 to 30,000 hours raises success from 17.1% to 44.1% on G1-OP and from 13.4% to 31.1% on G2-90D; despite comprising less than 2% of the co-training data, G2-90D improves by 17.7 points, suggesting cross-embodiment transfer. Gains span 19/20 and 18/20 skill groups, and skill-specific coverage strongly correlates with zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) success (Pearson r=0.80; Spearman rho=0.85). Under the same protocol, the model grounds object, color, shape, and position references in at least 90% of trials and follows explicit instructions even when they conflict with an already-committed behavior or a conventional scene association.

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requires continuous geometry-aware whole-body adaptation, including coordinated arm placement, torso adjustment, and gait modulation for collision-free movement through complex 3D spaces. We introduce TANGO, the first whole-body vision-language navigation framework for language-conditioned humanoid traversal in cluttered environments. Given a natural-language instruction and egocentric RGB observations, TANGO directly predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions for downstream whole-body control. We train TANGO entirely in simulation by synthesizing diverse collision-free traversal behaviors via global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. This pipeline provides dynamically feasible action supervision for learning language-conditioned whole-body policies. In extensive simulation experiments, TANGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in vision-language navigation, while outperforming strong modular baselines in navigating challenging scenes requiring obstacle negotiation. Lastly, we deploy TANGO zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, and observe robust language-guided traversal in cluttered real-world scenes without training on any real-world navigation data.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 7 1

ResWM: Residual-Action World Model for Visual RL

Learning predictive world models from raw visual observations is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for robotics and continuous control. Conventional model-based RL frameworks directly condition future predictions on absolute actions, which makes optimization unstable: the optimal action distributions are task-dependent, unknown a priori, and often lead to oscillatory or inefficient control. To address this, we introduce the Residual-Action World Model (ResWM), a new framework that reformulates the control variable from absolute actions to residual actions -- incremental adjustments relative to the previous step. This design aligns with the inherent smoothness of real-world control, reduces the effective search space, and stabilizes long-horizon planning. To further strengthen the representation, we propose an Observation Difference Encoder that explicitly models the changes between adjacent frames, yielding compact latent dynamics that are naturally coupled with residual actions. ResWM is integrated into a Dreamer-style latent dynamics model with minimal modifications and no extra hyperparameters. Both imagination rollouts and policy optimization are conducted in the residual-action space, enabling smoother exploration, lower control variance, and more reliable planning. Empirical results on the DeepMind Control Suite demonstrate that ResWM achieves consistent improvements in sample efficiency, asymptotic returns, and control smoothness, significantly surpassing strong baselines such as Dreamer and TD-MPC. Beyond performance, ResWM produces more stable and energy-efficient action trajectories, a property critical for robotic systems deployed in real-world environments. These findings suggest that residual action modeling provides a simple yet powerful principle for bridging algorithmic advances in RL with the practical requirements of robotics.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 10

ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model

Mobile manipulation is a key capability for general-purpose robots, yet remains challenging for current embodied learning methods. VLA policies are typically reactive and lack explicit world modeling, while existing World Action Models (WAMs) are still poorly aligned with the structure of mobile manipulation: they operate on coarse video chunks, model entangled navigation-manipulation actions, and train inverse dynamics under supervision that does not match autoregressive inference. As a result, they often miss fine-grained contact dynamics, suffer from action-distribution conflicts, and accumulate errors over long-horizon rollouts. We propose ABot-M0.5, a new WAM built on the insight that mobile manipulation requires alignment at three levels: temporal granularity, action space, and train-test consistency. To align temporal granularity, we introduce intermediate latent actions that capture local visual state transitions and serve as an bridging action space between video latents and embodiment-specific controls. To align action space, we design a dual-level Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that disentangles both modality representations and heterogeneous action subspaces such as base movement and arm manipulation. To align inference conditions, we propose the dream-forcing training strategy that progressively trains inverse dynamics on model-predicted videos, improving train-test alignment and robustness during autoregressive prediction. Experiments on challenging mobile and fine-grained manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ABot-M0.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both long-horizon task success and finegrained control accuracy. These results highlight the critical importance of granularity-aligned, action-disentangled, and inference-consistent world-action modeling.

  • 21 authors
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Jun 30 2

UniMPA: A Unified Memory-Prediction-Action Model via Action-Grounded Transition Modeling

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have improved robotic manipulation, yet observation-to-action learning remains limited by a fundamental transition realizability gap, manifested in three tightly coupled problems: (i) Transition ambiguity. Visually similar current observations may correspond to different manipulation phases and imply different subsequent transitions. (ii) Prediction--execution mismatch. A visually plausible predicted future observation does not necessarily correspond to a physically realizable transition. (iii) Experience--realization mismatch. A historically executable action pattern may not necessarily realize the intended transition in the current scene and therefore requires context-aware adaptation. Accordingly, we propose UniMPA, a Unified Memory-Prediction-Action model that addresses these problems through a shared action-grounded transition interface. (i) UniMPA introduces Persistent-Selective Future Prediction to resolve transition ambiguity by modeling the intended future state evolution. A persistent latent stream continuously tracks task-level progress, while a transition-critical pixel stream selectively resolves fine-grained interaction changes through memory-grounded prediction. (ii) To assess the physical executability of the anticipated transition, the predicted transition queries a temporal Visual-Action Memory Bank. The bank retrieves historically realized visual-action experience, grounding future prediction in executable evidence. (iii) To adapt executable experience to the current scene, an Action-Visual Memory Bank retrieves visually grounded action prototypes from historical action evolution. Prototype-Biased Flow then shifts the flow source toward a historically supported action manifold for context-aware refinement.

  • 6 authors
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Sep 9

HapticWAM: Distilling Imagined Touch into a World-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensing

Contact-rich manipulation requires estimating forces, slip and contact geometry that can remain ambiguous in scene images. Optical tactile sensors provide both visual observations of the contact surface and mechanical measurements, yet learning from these signals raises two challenges: representing contact beyond appearance and transferring its benefits to a policy that does not require fingertip observations at deployment. We introduce HapticWAM, a world-action model that combines heterogeneous tactile encoding, structured contact prediction and teacher-student distillation. Its teacher encodes gel images together with deformation, shear, distributed forces, resultant wrench and derived contact state into a frozen video backbone. Rather than predicting tactile pixels alone, the model jointly generates actions and a contact package describing future events and mechanics. Anticipatory Contact Coupling uses the previously imagined package to condition attention, preserving a contact-related input when direct tactile observations are unavailable. Haptic-Imagination Distillation transfers both contact futures and action predictions to a student that retains the generative contact head but removes its fingertip input branches. On a real-world setup, across three contact-rich pick-and-place tasks, HapticWAM Student achieves a 77% per-task mean success rate (41 of 50 starts, 82% pooled), reaching 95% on one of the tasks, outperforming the evaluated teacher and baseline configurations.

OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model

Large policies pretrained on a combination of Internet-scale vision-language data and diverse robot demonstrations have the potential to change how we teach robots new skills: rather than training new behaviors from scratch, we can fine-tune such vision-language-action (VLA) models to obtain robust, generalizable policies for visuomotor control. Yet, widespread adoption of VLAs for robotics has been challenging as 1) existing VLAs are largely closed and inaccessible to the public, and 2) prior work fails to explore methods for efficiently fine-tuning VLAs for new tasks, a key component for adoption. Addressing these challenges, we introduce OpenVLA, a 7B-parameter open-source VLA trained on a diverse collection of 970k real-world robot demonstrations. OpenVLA builds on a Llama 2 language model combined with a visual encoder that fuses pretrained features from DINOv2 and SigLIP. As a product of the added data diversity and new model components, OpenVLA demonstrates strong results for generalist manipulation, outperforming closed models such as RT-2-X (55B) by 16.5% in absolute task success rate across 29 tasks and multiple robot embodiments, with 7x fewer parameters. We further show that we can effectively fine-tune OpenVLA for new settings, with especially strong generalization results in multi-task environments involving multiple objects and strong language grounding abilities, and outperform expressive from-scratch imitation learning methods such as Diffusion Policy by 20.4%. We also explore compute efficiency; as a separate contribution, we show that OpenVLA can be fine-tuned on consumer GPUs via modern low-rank adaptation methods and served efficiently via quantization without a hit to downstream success rate. Finally, we release model checkpoints, fine-tuning notebooks, and our PyTorch codebase with built-in support for training VLAs at scale on Open X-Embodiment datasets.

  • 18 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 1

SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025 1

Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.7% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms π_{0.5}, a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. Code and weights are released to support the open-source community.

SJTU-DENG-Lab DENG Lab @ SJTU
·
Nov 20, 2025 2

EvoVLA: Self-Evolving Vision-Language-Action Model

Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models despite recent progress in zero-shot generalization and simulation-to-real-world transfer. Current VLA models suffer from stage hallucination, where agents exploit coarse evaluation signals to shortcut multi-step tasks, reporting high progress without truly completing them. We present EvoVLA, a self-supervised VLA framework that addresses this issue through three complementary components: Stage-Aligned Reward (SAR), which uses triplet contrastive learning with Gemini-generated hard negatives to prevent visual shortcuts; Pose-Based Object Exploration (POE), which grounds curiosity in relative object-gripper pose instead of raw pixels; and Long-Horizon Memory, which uses selective context retention and gated fusion to stabilize intrinsic shaping during extended rollouts. Extensive evaluations on Discoverse-L, a long-horizon manipulation benchmark with three multi-stage tasks, show that EvoVLA improves average task success by 10.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline (OpenVLA-OFT), reaching 69.2 percent. EvoVLA also achieves one-and-a-half times better sample efficiency and reduces stage hallucination from 38.5 percent to 14.8 percent. Real-world deployment on physical robots reaches an average success rate of 54.6 percent across four manipulation tasks, outperforming OpenVLA-OFT by 11 points, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer and strong generalization. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EvoVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EvoVLA.

PekingUniversity Peking University
·
Nov 20, 2025 2

TIC-VLA: A Think-in-Control Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Robots in dynamic, human-centric environments must follow language instructions while maintaining real-time reactive control. Vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising framework, but they assume temporally aligned reasoning and control, despite semantic inference being inherently delayed relative to real-time action. We introduce Think-in-Control (TIC)-VLA, a latency-aware framework that explicitly models delayed semantic reasoning during action generation. TIC-VLA defines a delayed semantic-control interface that conditions action generation on delayed vision-language semantic states and explicit latency metadata, in addition to current observations, enabling policies to compensate for asynchronous reasoning. We further propose a latency-consistent training pipeline that injects reasoning inference delays during imitation learning and online reinforcement learning, aligning training with asynchronous deployment. To support realistic evaluation, we present DynaNav, a physics-accurate, photo-realistic simulation suite for language-guided navigation in dynamic environments. Extensive experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that TIC-VLA consistently outperforms prior VLA models while maintaining robust real-time control under multi-second reasoning latency. Project website: https://ucla-mobility.github.io/TIC-VLA/

DM0: An Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action Model towards Physical AI

Moving beyond the traditional paradigm of adapting internet-pretrained models to physical tasks, we present DM0, an Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for Physical AI. Unlike approaches that treat physical grounding as a fine-tuning afterthought, DM0 unifies embodied manipulation and navigation by learning from heterogeneous data sources from the onset. Our methodology follows a comprehensive three-stage pipeline: Pretraining, Mid-Training, and Post-Training. First, we conduct large-scale unified pretraining on the Vision-Language Model (VLM) using diverse corpora--seamlessly integrating web text, autonomous driving scenarios, and embodied interaction logs-to jointly acquire semantic knowledge and physical priors. Subsequently, we build a flow-matching action expert atop the VLM. To reconcile high-level reasoning with low-level control, DM0 employs a hybrid training strategy: for embodied data, gradients from the action expert are not backpropagated to the VLM to preserve generalized representations, while the VLM remains trainable on non-embodied data. Furthermore, we introduce an Embodied Spatial Scaffolding strategy to construct spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, effectively constraining the action solution space. Experiments on the RoboChallenge benchmark demonstrate that DM0 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Specialist and Generalist settings on Table30.

  • 49 authors
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Feb 16

$N_0$-VTLA: Scaling Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Latent Tactile Tokens

We present N_0-VTLA, a vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) foundation model capable of (1) fine-grained contact-rich manipulation with tactile perception and tactile-feedback control, and (2) offline policy improvement from stored deployment data. Building on current vision-based backbones, we propose a training recipe for tactile integration consisting of visuo-tactile pre-training, staged tactile-pathway integration, and advantage-conditioned offline policy improvement. During pre-training, the policy learns broad contact priors from NeoData, our large-scale visuo-tactile robot dataset; to our knowledge, N_0-VTLA is the first VTLA model pretrained on tactile data at scale. During post-training, we augment the policy with a predictive tactile pathway that distills the contact patterns learned at scale into the fine motion adjustments required by downstream tactile-centric manipulation. For offline policy improvement, we introduce ALTER, an advantage-conditioned offline reinforcement learning method that converts relative progress and trajectory-event comparisons into binary advantage labels for policy training on a fixed deployment corpus, further improving task-specific learning on contact-rich skills such as deformable object manipulation. Across contact-rich benchmarks, N_0-VTLA outperforms strong baselines by wide margins: it wins all nine real-robot NeoReal tasks and reaches 63.8% mean success on a twenty-task simulation suite, against 44.0% for the strongest baseline. N_0-VTLA policies trained with ALTER reach 75-95% success on three long-horizon real-robot tasks. These results lay a foundation for versatile tactile-driven manipulation policies.

NeoteAIEmbodied NeoteAI
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Jul 25 2

$ω$-0: A Latent Predictive World Action Model for Concurrent Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Humanoid household tasks often require concurrent loco-manipulation, where the robot must move, adjust posture, maintain balance, and manipulate objects as a single coordinated behavior. Yet existing humanoid policies typically decompose locomotion and manipulation, while recent world-action models remain either arm-centric or video-centered. We present ω-0, a latent predictive whole-body world-action model for real-world humanoid concurrent loco-manipulation. Given a language instruction, current visual observation, and robot proprioceptive state, ω-0 directly predicts controller-compatible whole-body action latents for real-robot execution. Rather than reconstructing future videos, ω-0 learns compact future observation embeddings as a lightweight predictive objective, coupling latent visual foresight with diffusion-based whole-body action generation. The model supports egocentric RGB, exocentric RGB, and exocentric depth inputs, and leverages controller-based simulation replay to ground human/public visual-motion priors into robot-executable action latents. We further collect ω-HOME, a 40+ hour real-world household humanoid dataset with synchronized multi-view observations, whole-body SMPL motions, robot states, and action latents. Real-world experiments on 11 household tasks demonstrate that a single ω-0 model can produce smooth manipulate-while-moving behaviors and consistently outperform representative imitation learning, VLA, humanoid, and WAM baselines.

  • 11 authors
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Aug 8

DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation depends on contact dynamics that are often only partially observable from vision. Recent World-Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive video world modeling with action generation, but remain largely vision-centric and therefore cannot directly model these contact dynamics. We present DexTacWAM, a visuo-tactile WAM that encodes each fingertip independently, aggregates the resulting features through a finger- and pose-aware tactile compressor, and injects the tactile latent into a video diffusion world model for joint visuo-tactile world modeling. Across six contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks on a 22-DoF bimanual platform, DexTacWAM achieves the highest score on every task, averaging 70.6 versus 38.0 for the strongest baseline. Ablations attribute the gain to modeling contact evolution as part of the predicted world state rather than tactile conditioning alone: removing tactile world modeling reduces the four-task mean from 74.7 to 26.6 while keeping the same tactile features and action expert. After four hours of tactile-encoder adaptation with a frozen pretrained vision VAE, our continual vision-to-touch learning extends the pretrained video model to touch using roughly 100 demonstrations per task without tactile midtraining, while retaining visual prediction quality within 0.5 dB of vision-only counterparts. The compressor retains 89.4% of pre-fusion contact recall while enabling 2.26x faster training and 1.29x faster inference. Together, these results show that pretrained video priors can be extended to distributed multi-finger contact dynamics in a data- and compute-efficient manner.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 20

InternW0-$Δ$: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model visual dynamics and action generation for generalist robot manipulation. A central challenge is to integrate priors from large-scale pretrained models---including visual dynamics, scene semantics, geometry, and motion---into a unified framework for robot action generation. We introduce InternW0-Δ, a unified WAM pretrained on a heterogeneous corpus that outperforms prior methods across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. InternW0-Δ combines pretrained visual dynamics, scene-level semantics, 4D geometric and motion priors, and action generation within a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) framework. A pretrained video expert and an action expert interact under semantic guidance from a frozen VLM, while a pretrained 4D foundation model injects geometric and motion priors through training-only distillation. We further introduce Causal Imprint, which learns future-relevant scene changes from training-only future supervision and provides predictive representations directly to the action expert without future-video rollout at inference. For large-scale joint training, we construct a heterogeneous corpus of robot demonstrations, UMI data, egocentric human demonstrations, and Ego2Robot data, curated and aligned under a common state-action representation. The resulting corpus contains over 20K hours of processed training data, to our knowledge the largest open-source corpus of its kind. We pretrain InternW0-Δ on this corpus and demonstrate strong performance across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. We will open source the training code, model weights, infrastructure, data-processing pipeline, and processed data where licenses permit. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/InternW0-Delta/

  • 48 authors
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Sep 24 2

Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model

Recently, augmenting Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) with world modeling has shown promise in improving robotic policy learning. However, it remains challenging to jointly predict next-state observations and action sequences because of the inherent difference between the two modalities. To address this, we propose DUal-STream diffusion (DUST), a world-model augmented VLA framework that handles the modality conflict and enhances the performance of VLAs across diverse tasks. Specifically, we propose a multimodal diffusion transformer architecture that explicitly maintains separate modality streams while still enabling cross-modal knowledge sharing. In addition, we introduce independent noise perturbations for each modality and a decoupled flow-matching loss. This design enables the model to learn the joint distribution in a bidirectional manner while avoiding the need for a unified latent space. Based on the decoupling of modalities during training, we also introduce a joint sampling method that supports test-time scaling, where action and vision tokens evolve asynchronously at different rates. Through experiments on simulated benchmarks such as RoboCasa and GR-1, DUST achieves up to 6% gains over baseline methods, while our test-time scaling approach provides an additional 2-5% boost. On real-world tasks with the Franka Research 3, DUST improves success rates by 13%, confirming its effectiveness beyond simulation. Furthermore, pre-training on action-free videos from BridgeV2 yields significant transfer gains on RoboCasa, underscoring DUST's potential for large-scale VLA pretraining.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 31, 2025 1

StarVLA: A Lego-like Codebase for Vision-Language-Action Model Developing

Building generalist embodied agents requires integrating perception, language understanding, and action, which are core capabilities addressed by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) approaches based on multimodal foundation models, including recent advances in vision-language models and world models. Despite rapid progress, VLA methods remain fragmented across incompatible architectures, codebases, and evaluation protocols, hindering principled comparison and reproducibility. We present StarVLA, an open-source codebase for VLA research. StarVLA addresses these challenges in three aspects. First, it provides a modular backbone--action-head architecture that supports both VLM backbones (e.g., Qwen-VL) and world-model backbones (e.g., Cosmos) alongside representative action-decoding paradigms, all under a shared abstraction in which backbone and action head can each be swapped independently. Second, it provides reusable training strategies, including cross-embodiment learning and multimodal co-training, that apply consistently across supported paradigms. Third, it integrates major benchmarks, including LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin~2.0, RoboCasa-GR1, and BEHAVIOR-1K, through a unified evaluation interface that supports both simulation and real-robot deployment. StarVLA also ships simple, fully reproducible single-benchmark training recipes that, despite minimal data engineering, already match or surpass prior methods on multiple benchmarks with both VLM and world-model backbones. To our best knowledge, StarVLA is one of the most comprehensive open-source VLA frameworks available, and we expect it to lower the barrier for reproducing existing methods and prototyping new ones. StarVLA is being actively maintained and expanded; we will update this report as the project evolves. The code and documentation are available at https://github.com/starVLA/starVLA.

  • 1 authors
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Apr 5

METIS: Multi-Source Egocentric Training for Integrated Dexterous Vision-Language-Action Model

Building a generalist robot that can perceive, reason, and act across diverse tasks remains an open challenge, especially for dexterous manipulation. A major bottleneck lies in the scarcity of large-scale, action-annotated data for dexterous skills, as teleoperation is difficult and costly. Human data, with its vast scale and diverse manipulation behaviors, provides rich priors for learning robotic actions. While prior works have explored leveraging human demonstrations, they are often constrained by limited scenarios and a large visual gap between human and robots. To eliminate these limitations, we propose METIS, a vision-language-action (VLA) model for dexterous manipulation pretrained on multi-source egocentric datasets. We first construct EgoAtlas, which integrates large-scale human and robotic data from multiple sources, all unified under a consistent action space. We further extract motion-aware dynamics, a compact and discretized motion representation, which provides efficient and expressive supervision for VLA training. Built upon them, METIS integrates reasoning and acting into a unified framework, enabling effective deployment to downstream dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities, achieving highest average success rate in six real-world tasks. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness to out-of-distribution scenarios. These findings emphasize METIS as a promising step toward a generalist model for dexterous manipulation.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

OpenWAM: An Open, Modular Exploration Towards Systematic World-Action Model Pretraining

World-Action Models inherit world knowledge from video-generative priors, and channel it into executable control signals through embodied experience. Existing systems, however, are monolithic: the generative backbone, visual representation, architecture, information flow, inference procedure, and training data are tightly coupled, obscuring which design choices matter and why. We introduce OpenWAM, an open research stack that turns world-action pretraining into a controlled experimental program. OpenWAM-Infra factorizes the WAM design space into composable modules with unified training, inference, deployment, and evaluation. On this substrate, OpenWAM-Study examines three questions through controlled experiments: what to inherit, how world and action learning interact, and how their synergy scales; and distills three principles: upstream knowledge transfers through a sufficiently capable generative backbone and a compact, information-rich latent space; world-action synergy requires dedicated action capacity, explicit world-to-action information flow, and synchronized joint denoising; and embodied pretraining principally improves out-of-domain generalization, with one-stage co-training over egocentric and robot data integrating world coverage and action grounding. Composing these principles, we build OpenWAM-α, an open WAM pretrained on roughly 6,400 hours of egocentric human and robot data and evaluated across simulation and real-world benchmarks. Across the eight simulation benchmarks and the real-robot experiments, which together span embodiments from single-arm and bimanual manipulation to dexterous hands, OpenWAM-α delivers consistently excellent performance, sustaining its top-tier standing from simulation to the physical world. We release the full stack, including infrastructure, evaluation protocols, pretrained models, and data recipes, to facilitate future research.

OpenWAM OpenWAM
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Sep 6 2

Being-H0.5: Scaling Human-Centric Robot Learning for Cross-Embodiment Generalization

We introduce Being-H0.5, a foundational Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed for robust cross-embodiment generalization across diverse robotic platforms. While existing VLAs often struggle with morphological heterogeneity and data scarcity, we propose a human-centric learning paradigm that treats human interaction traces as a universal "mother tongue" for physical interaction. To support this, we present UniHand-2.0, the largest embodied pre-training recipe to date, comprising over 35,000 hours of multimodal data across 30 distinct robotic embodiments. Our approach introduces a Unified Action Space that maps heterogeneous robot controls into semantically aligned slots, enabling low-resource robots to bootstrap skills from human data and high-resource platforms. Built upon this human-centric foundation, we design a unified sequential modeling and multi-task pre-training paradigm to bridge human demonstrations and robotic execution. Architecturally, Being-H0.5 utilizes a Mixture-of-Transformers design featuring a novel Mixture-of-Flow (MoF) framework to decouple shared motor primitives from specialized embodiment-specific experts. Finally, to make cross-embodiment policies stable in the real world, we introduce Manifold-Preserving Gating for robustness under sensory shift and Universal Async Chunking to universalize chunked control across embodiments with different latency and control profiles. We empirically demonstrate that Being-H0.5 achieves state-of-the-art results on simulated benchmarks, such as LIBERO (98.9%) and RoboCasa (53.9%), while also exhibiting strong cross-embodiment capabilities on five robotic platforms.

BeingBeyond BeingBeyond
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Jan 19 3

Multisensory Continual Learning: Adapting Pretrained Visuomotor Policies to Force

Robot manipulation often relies on sensory feedback beyond vision, particularly in contact-rich settings where force, tactile, or audio signals reveal interaction states that are not directly observable from images. However, these modalities are often hardware- and task-specific, and large-scale multisensory robot datasets remain scarce. As a result, it is impractical to pretrain policies with every sensor they may encounter. We study multisensory continual learning: adapting a pretrained robot policy such as a World-Action Model or VLA to new tasks with newly introduced modalities while preserving performance under the original sensor suite. We propose MultiSensory World Model (MuSe), which incorporates limited multisensory data into pretrained vision-only policies through multi-stage fusion, multisensory future prediction, and experience replay over pretraining data. We instantiate MuSe by augmenting a pretrained vision-only World-Action Model with tactile force-torque sensing and evaluate it on real-world manipulation tasks. Our experiments show that MuSe performs strongly on contact-rich finetuning tasks while preserving, and in some cases improving, performance on the original pretraining tasks. These results suggest that a modest multisensory dataset can improve general robot capabilities beyond the finetuning distribution. Project website: https://jadenvc.github.io/multisensory-continual-learning/

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 5

BridgeVLA: Input-Output Alignment for Efficient 3D Manipulation Learning with Vision-Language Models

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BridgeVLA, a novel 3D VLA model that (1) projects 3D inputs to multiple 2D images, ensuring input alignment with the VLM backbone, and (2) utilizes 2D heatmaps for action prediction, unifying the input and output spaces within a consistent 2D image space. In addition, we propose a scalable pre-training method that equips the VLM backbone with the capability to predict 2D heatmaps before downstream policy learning. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is able to learn 3D manipulation efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81.4% to 88.2%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56.7% to 64.0%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 96.8% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, highlighting its extraordinary sample efficiency. Project Website:https://bridgevla.github.io/

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025 2

WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints

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.

  • 31 authors
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May 31 1

LabVLA: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Models in Scientific Laboratories

Scientific laboratories increasingly rely on AI systems to reason about experiments, but the physical act of doing science remains largely outside their reach. AI can help read literature, generate hypotheses, and plan protocols, yet the execution of those protocols at the bench still requires a human operator. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide one possible interface between written protocols and robot execution, but existing policies are trained mostly on household and tabletop demonstrations and rarely encounter the instruments, transparent liquids, or fixed protocol workflows found in scientific laboratories. Closing this gap requires both laboratory-specific supervision and a unified learning framework that can accommodate the diverse robot embodiments used to execute experimental protocols. We therefore identify data and embodiment as central bottlenecks alongside model design. To address the data side, we build RoboGenesis, a simulation-based workflow and data engine that composes configured laboratory workflows from atomic skills, validates and filters rollouts, and exports structured demonstrations across supported robot profiles. On the policy side, we present LabVLA, trained with a two-stage recipe: FAST action token pretraining first makes the Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct backbone action aware before any continuous control is learned, and flow matching posttraining then attaches a DiT action expert under knowledge insulation. On the LabUtopia benchmark, LabVLA achieves the highest average success rate among all evaluated baselines under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

  • 18 authors
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Jun 10 2

UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions

A generalist robot should perform effectively across various environments. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on scaling action-annotated data to enhance their capabilities. Consequently, they are often limited to single physical specification and struggle to learn transferable knowledge across different embodiments and environments. To confront these limitations, we propose UniVLA, a new framework for learning cross-embodiment vision-language-action (VLA) policies. Our key innovation is to derive task-centric action representations from videos with a latent action model. This enables us to exploit extensive data across a wide spectrum of embodiments and perspectives. To mitigate the effect of task-irrelevant dynamics, we incorporate language instructions and establish a latent action model within the DINO feature space. Learned from internet-scale videos, the generalist policy can be deployed to various robots through efficient latent action decoding. We obtain state-of-the-art results across multiple manipulation and navigation benchmarks, as well as real-robot deployments. UniVLA achieves superior performance over OpenVLA with less than 1/20 of pretraining compute and 1/10 of downstream data. Continuous performance improvements are observed as heterogeneous data, even including human videos, are incorporated into the training pipeline. The results underscore UniVLA's potential to facilitate scalable and efficient robot policy learning.

  • 8 authors
·
May 9, 2025 2

CLIP-RT: Learning Language-Conditioned Robotic Policies from Natural Language Supervision

Teaching robots desired skills in real-world environments remains challenging, especially for non-experts. A key bottleneck is that collecting robotic data often requires expertise or specialized hardware, limiting accessibility and scalability. We posit that natural language offers an intuitive and accessible interface for robot learning. To this end, we study two aspects: (1) enabling non-experts to collect robotic data through natural language supervision (e.g., "move the arm to the right") and (2) training robot policies directly from this supervision. Specifically, we introduce a data collection framework that collects robot demonstrations based on natural language supervision and further augments these demonstrations. We then present CLIP-RT, a new vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns language-conditioned visuomotor policies from this supervision. CLIP-RT adapts the pretrained CLIP model and learns to predict language-based motion primitives via contrastive imitation learning. We train CLIP-RT on the Open X-Embodiment dataset and finetune it on in-domain data collected by our framework. In real-world evaluations, CLIP-RT demonstrates strong capabilities in learning novel manipulation skills, outperforming OpenVLA (7B parameters) by 24% in average success rates, while using 7x fewer parameters (1B). We further assess CLIP-RT's capabilities in few-shot generalization and collaborative scenarios involving large pretrained models or humans. In simulated environments, CLIP-RT also yields strong performance, achieving a 93.1% average success rate on the LIBERO benchmark with an inference throughput of 163 Hz.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 1, 2024

HiFi-UMI: Learning Deployable Manipulation Policies from High-Fidelity UMI Data Alone

Learning deployable manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of data that is both high-fidelity and scalable. Real-robot teleoperation is accurate but costly to scale; robot-free UMI capture scales readily, and current practice uses the resulting data mainly for pre-training, adding a small real-robot "anchor" at post-training. We ask whether raising the fidelity of robot-free UMI data, rather than shrinking the real-robot fraction, can remove that anchor. We present HiFi-UMI, a portable UMI data-production system co-designed for trajectory accuracy, inter-gripper relative pose, synchronization, and field of view: head-mounted offline stereo-inertial SLAM, native rather than reconstructed relative pose, a shared microsecond GPIO trigger, and two wide-angle cameras per hand covering ~200 degrees. It reaches 3 mm workspace-local end-effector accuracy without external tracking infrastructure. Using this corpus, we demonstrate zero-robot post-training: a policy post-trained solely on HiFi-UMI demonstrations deploys directly on a real robot and matches in-domain teleoperation across three backbones spanning the vision-language-action and world-action-model families, with success-rate differences of -2.5, +3.1, and -0.6 percentage points on StarVLA-QwenPI, OpenPI-pi_0.5, and LingBot-VA; the strongest policy reaches 85% on a precision insertion task, even though the teleoperation baseline is collected in the evaluation scene and no HiFi-UMI trajectory is. Pre-training on 4,000 hours from the same corpus lowers action error on ten unseen tasks by 41% and, on StarVLA-QwenPI, raises real-robot success by a further 18.1 percentage points. We open-source HiFi-UMI-2K, 2,000 hours of microsecond-synchronized, ultra-wide-FoV demonstrations, each automatically reconstructed and validated through simulation replay, as a large-scale, high-fidelity resource for the robot-learning community.

LICOA: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Optical Actions for Mobile Spatial Augmented Reality

Spatial augmented reality (SAR) augments physical environments with projected content, but most systems assume that the projector pose, target region, or motion path has been fixed or specified. We instead make projected light an embodied action: given a language instruction and current visual observations, a system must decide how to move and where and at what scale to place the projection. We introduce LICOA to realize this capability. Its differential-drive chassis provides room-scale approach and repositioning, while a steerable mirror with two degrees of freedom (2DoF) and projection scale provide rapid local control of the beam. A shared interface maps synchronized external and onboard RGB cameras with robot control state to physical optical actions across pretrained action models. Because instruction-conditioned optical action lacks dedicated training data and a common evaluation protocol, we construct a matched simulation embodiment and a corpus with 150 tasks and 7,500 rendered episodes, then evaluate models trained only on this corpus in previously unseen real-world environments. Across 480 complete closed-loop real-world execution trials (rollouts) on 12 tasks, the best adapted action model achieves a 57.50% success rate and 40.64% success weighted by path length, compared with 8.33% and 5.15% for the same architecture trained from scratch. A further 150 real-world ablation rollouts support the need for both camera views and coordinated control of the chassis and mirror. These results establish a physical platform, shared perception and optical action interface, corpus, and real-world evaluation protocol for treating projected light as an embodied action.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14

ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills

Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility in performing human-like, whole-body skills. However, achieving agile and coordinated whole-body motions remains a significant challenge due to the dynamics mismatch between simulation and the real world. Existing approaches, such as system identification (SysID) and domain randomization (DR) methods, often rely on labor-intensive parameter tuning or result in overly conservative policies that sacrifice agility. In this paper, we present ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics), a two-stage framework designed to tackle the dynamics mismatch and enable agile humanoid whole-body skills. In the first stage, we pre-train motion tracking policies in simulation using retargeted human motion data. In the second stage, we deploy the policies in the real world and collect real-world data to train a delta (residual) action model that compensates for the dynamics mismatch. Then, ASAP fine-tunes pre-trained policies with the delta action model integrated into the simulator to align effectively with real-world dynamics. We evaluate ASAP across three transfer scenarios: IsaacGym to IsaacSim, IsaacGym to Genesis, and IsaacGym to the real-world Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our approach significantly improves agility and whole-body coordination across various dynamic motions, reducing tracking error compared to SysID, DR, and delta dynamics learning baselines. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids.

  • 18 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025