Daily Papers

Evaluation is shifting from static QA toward agentic settings where models act through external tools. We identify a critical yet underexplored capability within this space - dexterous visual tool use: fine-grained, closed-loop parameterized visual action in which models infer tool parameters from visual evidence, and those parameters directly govern the final result. Existing benchmarks cover web navigation, GUI operation, and software engineering, but rarely target this coupling between visual evidence and execution precision. We propose EASEL, a benchmark evaluating a controlled instance of dexterous visual tool use that adopts reference-guided visual reconstruction as its primary proxy task: the agent incrementally paints a canvas to match a reference image. EASEL additionally includes semantic tasks spanning region annotation, handwriting, and path planning. We further provide EASEL-Data, a 440k-sample two-stage curriculum dataset for trajectory supervision, and EASEL-9B to investigate its effect on this capability. Evaluation of 25 models reveals that current multimodal agents systematically struggle on EASEL. Reconstruction similarity bottlenecks at low levels (0.40-0.54), while trajectory diagnostics expose severe closed-loop instability - models typically saturate early or degrade post-peak. Semantic tasks reveal sharp capability boundaries in precision annotation and path planning. EASEL-9B, trained on EASEL-Data, surpasses the base model by a relative 6.3%, ranking third among all evaluated models.

Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and multiple embodiments. In downstream manipulation settings, the model produces imagined rollouts whose outcomes correlate with real-world execution for policy evaluation, improves decision making by ranking candidate futures in model-based planning, and supports inverse modeling by synthesizing robot motion from desired object motion.

Long-horizon action-conditioned video generation aims to synthesize temporally coherent videos that follow complex action instructions over extended horizons, requiring procedural ordering, persistent action execution, and scene consistency beyond conventional TI2V's short-term fidelity. Existing single-shot video generation models typically operate in an open-loop manner, leading to incomplete action execution, hallucinated motions, and temporal drift. To address this, we propose SPIRAL, a closed-loop framework that performs sequential planning and iterative reflection for action-conditioned long-horizon video generation. Specifically, SPIRAL instantiates a think-act-reflect process: a PlanAgent decomposes high-level goals into sub-actions, which condition a VideoGenerator to synthesize each segment alongside a memory context, while a CriticAgent evaluates intermediate video segments to provide corrective feedback for iterative refinement. This closed-loop design further supports self-evolution by utilizing PlanAgent-proposed actions and CriticAgent-derived rewards for GRPO-based post-training to enhance the video generator's long-horizon consistency. Moreover, we introduce ActVideoGen-Dataset for task-specific training, and establish ActVideoGen-Bench as a dedicated evaluation suite for measuring action quality and temporal coherence. Experiments across multiple TI2V backbones alongside the self-evolving strategy show consistent gains on ActVideoGen-Bench and VBench, demonstrating the effectiveness of SPIRAL.

Embodied world models have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for visual robotic decision-making and interactive environment simulation. However, conventional embodied frameworks rely on low-dimensional structured action vectors (e.g., joint angles and end-effector poses), which suffer from limited expressive capacity, poor generalization across diverse embodiments, and unnatural dynamic modeling for complex physical interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposesiMac (Image as Action Control), a novel unified control paradigm that treats raw visual images as native action representations for embodied world models. Departing from traditional explicit kinematic action encoding, iMac formulates continuous visual manipulation as image-based action tokens, which inherently encapsulate spatial motion intentions, interactive geometric constraints and subtle physical dynamics. We construct a dual-branch embodied architecture consisting of an image-action encoder and a dynamic world predictor: the encoder compresses target-driven visual images into compact action embeddings, while the predictor learns environment transition rules conditioned on image actions to achieve high-fidelity future state prediction and closed-loop embodied control. Extensive experiments are conducted on public embodied manipulation benchmarks and real-world robotic scenarios. The results demonstrate that iMac outperforms vector-based action control baselines in prediction accuracy, task success rate and cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, our image-action design eliminates the reliance on manually defined action spaces, realizing flexible and universal control for heterogeneous embodied agents. This work provides an innovative visual-action perspective for embodied world models, offering a simple yet effective paradigm for scalable robotic perception and manipulation.

Learning long-horizon embodied behaviors from synthetic data remains challenging because generated scenes are often physically implausible, language-driven programs frequently "succeed" without satisfying task semantics, and high-level instructions require grounding into executable action sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce V-CAGE, a closed-loop framework for generating robust, semantically aligned manipulation datasets at scale. First, we propose a context-aware instantiation mechanism that enforces geometric consistency during scene synthesis. By dynamically maintaining a map of prohibited spatial areas as objects are placed, our system prevents interpenetration and ensures reachable, conflict-free configurations in cluttered environments. Second, to bridge the gap between abstract intent and low-level control, we employ a hierarchical instruction decomposition module. This decomposes high-level goals (e.g., "get ready for work") into compositional action primitives, facilitating coherent long-horizon planning. Crucially, we enforce semantic correctness through a VLM-based verification loop. Acting as a visual critic, the VLM performs rigorous rejection sampling after each subtask, filtering out "silent failures" where code executes but fails to achieve the visual goal. Experiments demonstrate that V-CAGE yields datasets with superior physical and semantic fidelity, significantly boosting the success rate and generalization of downstream policies compared to non-verified baselines.

Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires bridging the gap between high-level planning (System 2) and low-level control (System 1). Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often entangle these processes, performing redundant multimodal reasoning at every timestep, which leads to high latency and goal instability. To address this, we present StreamVLA, a dual-system architecture that unifies textual task decomposition, visual goal imagination, and continuous action generation within a single parameter-efficient backbone. We introduce a "Lock-and-Gated" mechanism to intelligently modulate computation: only when a sub-task transition is detected, the model triggers slow thinking to generate a textual instruction and imagines the specific visual completion state, rather than generic future frames. Crucially, this completion state serves as a time-invariant goal anchor, making the policy robust to execution speed variations. During steady execution, these high-level intents are locked to condition a Flow Matching action head, allowing the model to bypass expensive autoregressive decoding for 72% of timesteps. This hierarchical abstraction ensures sub-goal focus while significantly reducing inference latency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that StreamVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 98.5% success rate on the LIBERO benchmark and robust recovery in real-world interference scenarios, achieving a 48% reduction in latency compared to full-reasoning baselines.

Vision-based robotic policies often struggle with even minor viewpoint changes, underscoring the need for view-invariant visual representations. This challenge becomes more pronounced in real-world settings, where viewpoint variability is unavoidable and can significantly disrupt policy performance. Existing methods typically learn invariance from multi-view observations at the scene level, but such approaches rely on visual appearance and fail to incorporate the physical dynamics essential for robust generalization. We propose View-Invariant Latent Action (VILA), which models a latent action capturing transition patterns across trajectories to learn view-invariant representations grounded in physical dynamics. VILA aligns these latent actions across viewpoints using an action-guided objective based on ground-truth action sequences. Experiments in both simulation and the real world show that VILA-based policies generalize effectively to unseen viewpoints and transfer well to new tasks, establishing VILA as a strong pretraining framework that improves robustness and downstream learning performance.

In this work, we present B-spline Policy (BSP), an action representation designed for accelerating robot manipulation policies. Rather than predicting discrete-time action chunks, BSP parameterizes actions as continuous B-spline curves defined by a set of knots and control points. This representation yields smooth, time-continuous trajectories that can be temporally scaled and executed by low-level controllers at higher frequencies and speeds. We show that B-spline-parameterized actions can be seamlessly integrated into standard policy learning pipelines by directly predicting B-spline parameters. Experiments on simulated and real-world tasks demonstrate that BSP significantly reduces task completion time, achieving substantial improvements over baseline methods while maintaining strong success rates. More results: https://b-spline-policy.github.io

The advent of video-action models offers a promising path for robot control. Nevertheless, we argue that repurposing video generative models designed for digital content creation is inherently inadequate for physical environments. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VA 2.0, a video-action foundation model built from the ground up for embodiment. Four core design principles showcase its evolution from LingBot-VA. (1) Departing from traditional reconstruction-focused VAEs, we introduce a semantic visual-action tokenizer, which aligns visual representations with both semantics and actions, improving instruction following and action precision in subsequent policy learning. (2) Given the strictly causal nature of temporal dynamics, we adopt a causal pretraining paradigm, training from scratch to circumvent the catastrophic forgetting that frequently occurs when adapting bidirectional architectures. (3) To meet the demands of high-frequency inference, our model employs a sparse MoE backbone, expanding model capacity without compromising efficiency. (4) Real-time closed-loop control is realized through an enhanced asynchronous inference scheme, which predicts future latents in parallel with action execution while re-grounding each rollout on the latest observation via learned forward dynamics. Real-world deployment validates LingBot-VA 2.0 as a robust foundation model, as evidenced by its few-shot generalization across complex manipulation tasks.

The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on embodied tasks and shown promising potential for real-world applications. However, current VLAs still struggle to produce consistent and precise target-oriented actions, as they often generate redundant or unstable motions along trajectories, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive scenarios.In this work, we attribute these redundant actions to the spatially uniform perception field of existing VLAs, which causes them to be distracted by target-irrelevant objects, especially in complex environments.To address this issue, we propose an efficient PosA-VLA framework that anchors visual attention via pose-conditioned supervision, consistently guiding the model's perception toward task-relevant regions. The pose-conditioned anchor attention mechanism enables the model to better align instruction semantics with actionable visual cues, thereby improving action generation precision and efficiency. Moreover, our framework adopts a lightweight architecture and requires no auxiliary perception modules (e.g., segmentation or grounding networks), ensuring efficient inference. Extensive experiments verify that our method executes embodied tasks with precise and time-efficient behavior across diverse robotic manipulation benchmarks and shows robust generalization in a variety of challenging environments.

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.

Prevailing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) for robotic manipulation are built upon vision-language backbones pretrained on large-scale, but disconnected static web data. As a result, despite improved semantic generalization, the policy must implicitly infer complex physical dynamics and temporal dependencies solely from robot trajectories. This reliance creates an unsustainable data burden, necessitating continuous, large-scale expert data collection to compensate for the lack of innate physical understanding. We contend that while vision-language pretraining effectively captures semantic priors, it remains blind to physical causality. A more effective paradigm leverages video to jointly capture semantics and visual dynamics during pretraining, thereby isolating the remaining task of low-level control. To this end, we introduce mimic-video, a novel Video-Action Model (VAM) that pairs a pretrained Internet-scale video model with a flow matching-based action decoder conditioned on its latent representations. The decoder serves as an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM), generating low-level robot actions from the latent representation of video-space action plans. Our extensive evaluation shows that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, improving sample efficiency by 10x and convergence speed by 2x compared to traditional VLA architectures.

We propose a novel parameterized skill-learning algorithm that aims to learn transferable parameterized skills and synthesize them into a new action space that supports efficient learning in long-horizon tasks. We propose to leverage off-policy Meta-RL combined with a trajectory-centric smoothness term to learn a set of parameterized skills. Our agent can use these learned skills to construct a three-level hierarchical framework that models a Temporally-extended Parameterized Action Markov Decision Process. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed algorithms enable an agent to solve a set of difficult long-horizon (obstacle-course and robot manipulation) tasks.

Leveraging diverse robotic data for pretraining remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically model the dataset's action distribution using simple observations as inputs. However, these inputs are often incomplete, resulting in a dispersed conditional action distribution-an issue we refer to as coordinate system chaos and state chaos. This inconsistency significantly hampers pretraining efficiency. To address this, we propose 4D-VLA, a novel approach that effectively integrates 4D information into the input to mitigate these sources of chaos. Our model introduces depth and temporal information into visual features with sequential RGB-D inputs, aligning the coordinate systems of the robot and the scene. This alignment endows the model with strong spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities while minimizing training overhead. Additionally, we introduce memory bank sampling, a frame sampling strategy designed to extract informative frames from historical images, further improving effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pretraining method and architectural components substantially enhance model performance. In both simulated and real-world experiments, our model achieves a significant increase in success rate over OpenVLA. To further assess spatial perception and generalization to novel views, we introduce MV-Bench, a multi-view simulation benchmark. Our model consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating stronger spatial understanding and adaptability.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve remarkable flexibility and generalization beyond classical control paradigms. However, most prevailing VLAs are trained under a single-frame observation paradigm, which leaves them structurally blind to temporal dynamics. Consequently, these models degrade severely in non-stationary scenarios, even when trained or finetuned on dynamic datasets. Existing approaches either require expensive retraining or suffer from latency bottlenecks and poor temporal consistency across action chunks. We propose Pace-and-Path Correction, a training-free, closed-form inference-time operator that wraps any chunked-action VLA. From a single quadratic cost, joint minimization yields a unified solution that decomposes orthogonally into two distinct channels. The pace channel compresses execution along the planned direction, while the path channel applies an orthogonal spatial offset, jointly absorbing the perceived dynamics within the chunk window. We evaluate our approach on a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark MoveBench designed to isolate motion as the sole controlled variable. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free wrappers and dynamic-adaptive methods and improves success rates by up to 28.8% and 25.9% in absolute terms over foundational VLA models in dynamic-only and static-dynamic mixed environments, respectively.

In embodied AI perception systems, visual perception should be active: the goal is not to passively process static images, but to actively acquire more informative data within pixel and spatial budget constraints. Existing vision models and fixed RGB-D camera systems fundamentally fail to reconcile wide-area coverage with fine-grained detail acquisition, severely limiting their efficacy in open-world robotic applications. To address this issue, we propose EyeVLA, a robotic eyeball for active visual perception that can take proactive actions based on instructions, enabling clear observation of fine-grained target objects and detailed information across a wide spatial extent. EyeVLA discretizes action behaviors into action tokens and integrates them with vision-language models (VLMs) that possess strong open-world understanding capabilities, enabling joint modeling of vision, language, and actions within a single autoregressive sequence. By using the 2D bounding box coordinates to guide the reasoning chain and applying reinforcement learning to refine the viewpoint selection policy, we transfer the open-world scene understanding capability of the VLM to a vision language action (VLA) policy using only minimal real-world data. Experiments show that our system efficiently performs instructed scenes in real-world environments and actively acquires more accurate visual information through instruction-driven actions of rotation and zoom, thereby achieving strong environmental perception capabilities. EyeVLA introduces a novel robotic vision system that leverages detailed and spatially rich, large-scale embodied data, and actively acquires highly informative visual observations for downstream embodied tasks.

In this work, we present an approach to construct a video-based robot policy capable of reliably executing diverse tasks across different robots and environments from few video demonstrations without using any action annotations. Our method leverages images as a task-agnostic representation, encoding both the state and action information, and text as a general representation for specifying robot goals. By synthesizing videos that ``hallucinate'' robot executing actions and in combination with dense correspondences between frames, our approach can infer the closed-formed action to execute to an environment without the need of any explicit action labels. This unique capability allows us to train the policy solely based on RGB videos and deploy learned policies to various robotic tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in learning policies on table-top manipulation and navigation tasks. Additionally, we contribute an open-source framework for efficient video modeling, enabling the training of high-fidelity policy models with four GPUs within a single day.

Video is a scalable observation of physical dynamics: it captures how objects move, how contact unfolds, and how scenes evolve under interaction -- all without requiring robot action labels. Yet translating this temporal structure into reliable robotic control remains an open challenge, because video lacks action supervision and differs from robot experience in embodiment, viewpoint, and physical constraints. This survey reviews methods that exploit non-action-annotated temporal video to learn control interfaces for robotic manipulation. We introduce an interface-centric taxonomy organized by where the video-to-control interface is constructed and what control properties it enables, identifying three families: direct video--action policies, which keep the interface implicit; latent-action methods, which route temporal structure through a compact learned intermediate; and explicit visual interfaces, which predict interpretable targets for downstream control. For each family, we analyze control-integration properties -- how the loop is closed, what can be verified before execution, and where failures enter. A cross-family synthesis reveals that the most pressing open challenges center on the robotics integration layer -- the mechanisms that connect video-derived predictions to dependable robot behavior -- and we outline research directions toward closing this gap.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit strong generalization for robotic manipulation, yet their high inference latency limits real time deployment. We identify two primary sources of temporal redundancy in existing VLA pipelines: repeated visual encoding of highly similar consecutive frames and multi step iterative sampling in diffusion based policies. To address this, we propose a system level acceleration strategy that reduces computation in both perception and action generation. On the perception side, we incrementally update only tokens corresponding to dynamic scene regions instead of re-encoding entire frames. On the policy side, we compress diffusion sampling into a compact 2-step schedule through efficiency oriented training while preserving action precision. Experiments on Libero, RobotWin, and Real Robot Platforms demonstrate over 2 times speedup while maintaining high performance, achieving up to 98% success rate on general manipulation benchmarks. Our codes will be released on Github.

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.

In this work, we focus on scaling open-vocabulary action detection. Existing approaches for action detection are predominantly limited to closed-set scenarios and rely on complex, parameter-heavy architectures. Extending these models to the open-vocabulary setting poses two key challenges: (1) the lack of large-scale datasets with many action classes for robust training, and (2) parameter-heavy adaptations to a pretrained vision-language contrastive model to convert it for detection, risking overfitting the additional non-pretrained parameters to base action classes. Firstly, we introduce an encoder-only multimodal model for video action detection, reducing the reliance on parameter-heavy additions for video action detection. Secondly, we introduce a simple weakly supervised training strategy to exploit an existing closed-set action detection dataset for pretraining. Finally, we depart from the ill-posed base-to-novel benchmark used by prior works in open-vocabulary action detection and devise a new benchmark to evaluate on existing closed-set action detection datasets without ever using them for training, showing novel results to serve as baselines for future work.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to learn semantic action representations from large-scale unannotated data. Yet, we identify two bottlenecks of LAMs: 1) the commonly adopted end-to-end trained image encoder suffers from poor spatial understanding; 2) LAMs can be fragile when input frames are distant, leading to limited temporal perception. Such factors inevitably hinder stable and clear action modeling. To this end, we propose Farsighted-LAM, a latent action framework with geometry-aware spatial encoding and multi-scale temporal modeling, capturing structural priors and dynamic motion patterns from consecutive frames. We further propose SSM-VLA, an end-to-end VLA framework built upon Farsighted-LAM, which integrates structured perception with a visual Chain-of-Thought module to explicitly reason about environmental dynamics, enhancing decision consistency and interpretability. We validate SSM-VLA on multiple VLA tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our strategy of combining geometry-aware modeling, temporal coherence, and explicit reasoning is effective in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied intelligence.

Recent progress in robotic world models has leveraged video diffusion transformers to predict future observations conditioned on historical states and actions. While these models can simulate realistic visual outcomes, they often exhibit poor action-following precision, hindering their utility for downstream robotic learning. In this work, we introduce World-VLA-Loop, a closed-loop framework for the joint refinement of world models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies. We propose a state-aware video world model that functions as a high-fidelity interactive simulator by jointly predicting future observations and reward signals. To enhance reliability, we introduce the SANS dataset, which incorporates near-success trajectories to improve action-outcome alignment within the world model. This framework enables a closed-loop for reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of VLA policies entirely within a virtual environment. Crucially, our approach facilitates a co-evolving cycle: failure rollouts generated by the VLA policy are iteratively fed back to refine the world model precision, which in turn enhances subsequent RL optimization. Evaluations across simulation and real-world tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly boosts VLA performance with minimal physical interaction, establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between world modeling and policy learning for general-purpose robotics. Project page: https://showlab.github.io/World-VLA-Loop/.

We propose Infinite-World, a robust interactive world model capable of maintaining coherent visual memory over 1000+ frames in complex real-world environments. While existing world models can be efficiently optimized on synthetic data with perfect ground-truth, they lack an effective training paradigm for real-world videos due to noisy pose estimations and the scarcity of viewpoint revisits. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a Hierarchical Pose-free Memory Compressor (HPMC) that recursively distills historical latents into a fixed-budget representation. By jointly optimizing the compressor with the generative backbone, HPMC enables the model to autonomously anchor generations in the distant past with bounded computational cost, eliminating the need for explicit geometric priors. Second, we propose an Uncertainty-aware Action Labeling module that discretizes continuous motion into a tri-state logic. This strategy maximizes the utilization of raw video data while shielding the deterministic action space from being corrupted by noisy trajectories, ensuring robust action-response learning. Furthermore, guided by insights from a pilot toy study, we employ a Revisit-Dense Finetuning Strategy using a compact, 30-minute dataset to efficiently activate the model's long-range loop-closure capabilities. Extensive experiments, including objective metrics and user studies, demonstrate that Infinite-World achieves superior performance in visual quality, action controllability, and spatial consistency.

While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.

Agents capable of reasoning and planning in the real world require the ability of predicting the consequences of their actions. While world models possess this capability, they most often require action labels, that can be complex to obtain at scale. This motivates the learning of latent action models, that can learn an action space from videos alone. Our work addresses the problem of learning latent actions world models on in-the-wild videos, expanding the scope of existing works that focus on simple robotics simulations, video games, or manipulation data. While this allows us to capture richer actions, it also introduces challenges stemming from the video diversity, such as environmental noise, or the lack of a common embodiment across videos. To address some of the challenges, we discuss properties that actions should follow as well as relevant architectural choices and evaluations. We find that continuous, but constrained, latent actions are able to capture the complexity of actions from in-the-wild videos, something that the common vector quantization does not. We for example find that changes in the environment coming from agents, such as humans entering the room, can be transferred across videos. This highlights the capability of learning actions that are specific to in-the-wild videos. In the absence of a common embodiment across videos, we are mainly able to learn latent actions that become localized in space, relative to the camera. Nonetheless, we are able to train a controller that maps known actions to latent ones, allowing us to use latent actions as a universal interface and solve planning tasks with our world model with similar performance as action-conditioned baselines. Our analyses and experiments provide a step towards scaling latent action models to the real world.

Despite significant progress in robotics and embodied AI in recent years, deploying robots for long-horizon tasks remains a great challenge. Majority of prior arts adhere to an open-loop philosophy and lack real-time feedback, leading to error accumulation and undesirable robustness. A handful of approaches have endeavored to establish feedback mechanisms leveraging pixel-level differences or pre-trained visual representations, yet their efficacy and adaptability have been found to be constrained. Inspired by classic closed-loop control systems, we propose CLOVER, a closed-loop visuomotor control framework that incorporates feedback mechanisms to improve adaptive robotic control. CLOVER consists of a text-conditioned video diffusion model for generating visual plans as reference inputs, a measurable embedding space for accurate error quantification, and a feedback-driven controller that refines actions from feedback and initiates replans as needed. Our framework exhibits notable advancement in real-world robotic tasks and achieves state-of-the-art on CALVIN benchmark, improving by 8% over previous open-loop counterparts. Code and checkpoints are maintained at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/CLOVER.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in static manipulation but struggle in dynamic environments with moving targets. This performance gap primarily stems from a scarcity of dynamic manipulation datasets and the reliance of mainstream VLAs on single-frame observations, restricting their spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities. To address this, we introduce DOMINO, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for generalizable dynamic manipulation, featuring 35 tasks with hierarchical complexities, over 110K expert trajectories, and a multi-dimensional evaluation suite. Through comprehensive experiments, we systematically evaluate existing VLAs on dynamic tasks, explore effective training strategies for dynamic awareness, and validate the generalizability of dynamic data. Furthermore, we propose PUMA, a dynamics-aware VLA architecture. By integrating scene-centric historical optical flow and specialized world queries to implicitly forecast object-centric future states, PUMA couples history-aware perception with short-horizon prediction. Results demonstrate that PUMA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding a 6.3% absolute improvement in success rate over baselines. Moreover, we show that training on dynamic data fosters robust spatiotemporal representations that transfer to static tasks. All code and data are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/DOMINO.

We propose a novel framework for learning high-level cognitive capabilities in robot manipulation tasks, such as making a smiley face using building blocks. These tasks often involve complex multi-step reasoning, presenting significant challenges due to the limited paired data connecting human instructions (e.g., making a smiley face) and robot actions (e.g., end-effector movement). Existing approaches relieve this challenge by adopting an open-loop paradigm decomposing high-level instructions into simple sub-task plans, and executing them step-by-step using low-level control models. However, these approaches are short of instant observations in multi-step reasoning, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose to automatically collect a cognitive robot dataset by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting dataset AlphaBlock consists of 35 comprehensive high-level tasks of multi-step text plans and paired observation sequences. To enable efficient data acquisition, we employ elaborated multi-round prompt designs that effectively reduce the burden of extensive human involvement. We further propose a closed-loop multi-modal embodied planning model that autoregressively generates plans by taking image observations as input. To facilitate effective learning, we leverage MiniGPT-4 with a frozen visual encoder and LLM, and finetune additional vision adapter and Q-former to enable fine-grained spatial perception for manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments to verify the superiority over existing open and closed-loop methods, and achieve a significant increase in success rate by 21.4% and 14.5% over ChatGPT and GPT-4 based robot tasks. Real-world demos are shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAzID1_qQk .

While the shortage of explicit action data limits Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, human action videos offer a scalable yet unlabeled data source. A critical challenge in utilizing large-scale human video datasets lies in transforming visual signals into ontology-independent representations, known as latent actions. However, the capacity of latent action representation to derive robust control from visual observations has yet to be rigorously evaluated. We introduce the Latent Action Representation Yielding (LARY) Benchmark, a unified framework for evaluating latent action representations on both high-level semantic actions (what to do) and low-level robotic control (how to do). The comprehensively curated dataset encompasses over one million videos (1,000 hours) spanning 151 action categories, alongside 620K image pairs and 595K motion trajectories across diverse embodiments and environments. Our experiments reveal two crucial insights: (i) General visual foundation models, trained without any action supervision, consistently outperform specialized embodied latent action models. (ii) Latent-based visual space is fundamentally better aligned to physical action space than pixel-based space. These results suggest that general visual representations inherently encode action-relevant knowledge for physical control, and that semantic-level abstraction serves as a fundamentally more effective pathway from vision to action than pixel-level reconstruction.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop deployment is hindered by the high latency and compute cost of repeatedly running large vision-language backbones at every timestep. We observe that VLA inference exhibits structured redundancies across temporal, spatial, and depth dimensions, and that most existing efficiency methods ignore action context, despite its central role in embodied tasks. To address this gap, we propose Action-Context-aware Adaptive Computation for VLA models (AC^2-VLA), a unified framework that conditions computation on current visual observations, language instructions, and previous action states. Based on this action-centric context, AC^2-VLA adaptively performs cognition reuse across timesteps, token pruning, and selective execution of model components within a unified mechanism. To train the adaptive policy, we introduce an action-guided self-distillation scheme that preserves the behavior of the dense VLA policy while enabling structured sparsification that transfers across tasks and settings. Extensive experiments on robotic manipulation benchmarks show that AC^2-VLA achieves up to a 1.79\times speedup while reducing FLOPs to 29.4% of the dense baseline, with comparable task success.

It is infeasible to encompass all possible disturbances within the training dataset. This raises a critical question regarding the robustness of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models when encountering unseen real-world visual disturbances, particularly under imperfect visual conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic study based on recent state-of-the-art VLA models and reveal a significant performance drop when visual disturbances absent from the training data are introduced. To mitigate this issue, we propose a lightweight adapter module grounded in information theory, termed the Information Bottleneck Adapter (IB-Adapter), which selectively filters potential noise from visual inputs. Without requiring any extra data or augmentation strategies, IB-Adapter consistently improves over the baseline by an average of 30%, while adding fewer than 10M parameters, demonstrating notable efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, even with a 14x smaller backbone (0.5B parameters) and no pre-training on the Open X-Embodiment dataset, our model StableVLA achieves robustness competitive with 7B-scale state-of-the-art VLAs. With negligible parameter overhead (<10M), our approach maintains accuracy on long-horizon tasks and surpasses OpenPi under both synthetic and physical visual corruptions.

Manipulating dynamic objects remains an open challenge for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which, despite strong generalization in static manipulation, struggle in dynamic scenarios requiring rapid perception, temporal anticipation, and continuous control. We present DynamicVLA, a framework for dynamic object manipulation that integrates temporal reasoning and closed-loop adaptation through three key designs: 1) a compact 0.4B VLA using a convolutional vision encoder for spatially efficient, structurally faithful encoding, enabling fast multimodal inference; 2) Continuous Inference, enabling overlapping reasoning and execution for lower latency and timely adaptation to object motion; and 3) Latent-aware Action Streaming, which bridges the perception-execution gap by enforcing temporally aligned action execution. To fill the missing foundation of dynamic manipulation data, we introduce the Dynamic Object Manipulation (DOM) benchmark, built from scratch with an auto data collection pipeline that efficiently gathers 200K synthetic episodes across 2.8K scenes and 206 objects, and enables fast collection of 2K real-world episodes without teleoperation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate remarkable improvements in response speed, perception, and generalization, positioning DynamicVLA as a unified framework for general dynamic object manipulation across embodiments.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but suffer catastrophic performance drops when canonical instructions are simply paraphrased. Although this brittleness is typically addressed through costly data scaling, our probing reveals that the root cause is architectural rather than a lack of semantic understanding. Specifically, we demonstrate that current VLAs successfully retain the correct task identity internally. The failure actually stems from the joint encoding of dynamic visual observations and text, which introduces systematic feature shifts. Because the downstream action policy is highly vulnerable to these variations, it fails to translate the preserved semantics into correct control commands. To resolve this structural bottleneck, we propose Grounded Semantic Re-binding (GSR), an elegant intervention that bypasses unstable joint routing by explicitly fusing independently extracted task semantics with native visual features to train a completely re-initialized action expert from scratch. This targeted intervention dramatically restores paraphrastic invariance using only canonical demonstrations. On the LIBERO-Para benchmark, GSR improves success rates by up to 44.6 percent. It enables lightweight models to rival massively scaled baselines and pushes state-of-the-art models to a new record PRIDE score of 70.4, outperforming the recently introduced large-scale pretrained model Xiaomi-Robotics-0 in instruction generation capabilities. Building on these insights, we also introduce ParaVLA, a natively decoupled 0.33B-parameter model exhibiting near-perfect robustness to instruction rewording. Ultimately, our work proves that robust semantic grounding can be achieved through elegant structural design, bypassing the inefficient brute-force data scaling paradigm.

Current efforts to learn scalable policies in robotic manipulation primarily fall into two categories: one focuses on "action," which involves behavior cloning from extensive collections of robotic data, while the other emphasizes "vision," enhancing model generalization by pre-training representations or generative models, also referred to as world models, using large-scale visual datasets. This paper presents an end-to-end paradigm that predicts actions using inverse dynamics models conditioned on the robot's forecasted visual states, named Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models (PIDM). By closing the loop between vision and action, the end-to-end PIDM can be a better scalable action learner. In practice, we use Transformers to process both visual states and actions, naming the model Seer. It is initially pre-trained on large-scale robotic datasets, such as DROID, and can be adapted to realworld scenarios with a little fine-tuning data. Thanks to large-scale, end-to-end training and the synergy between vision and action, Seer significantly outperforms previous methods across both simulation and real-world experiments. It achieves improvements of 13% on the LIBERO-LONG benchmark, 21% on CALVIN ABC-D, and 43% in real-world tasks. Notably, Seer sets a new state-of-the-art on CALVIN ABC-D benchmark, achieving an average length of 4.28, and exhibits superior generalization for novel objects, lighting conditions, and environments under high-intensity disturbances on real-world scenarios. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/Seer/.

We propose a standalone autoregressive (AR) Action Expert that generates actions as a continuous causal sequence while conditioning on refreshable vision-language prefixes. In contrast to existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and diffusion policies that reset temporal context with each new observation and predict actions reactively, our Action Expert maintains its own history through a long-lived memory and is inherently context-aware. This structure addresses the frequency mismatch between fast control and slow reasoning, enabling efficient independent pretraining of kinematic syntax and modular integration with heavy perception backbones, naturally ensuring spatio-temporally consistent action generation across frames. To synchronize these asynchronous hybrid V-L-A modalities, we utilize a re-anchoring mechanism that mathematically accounts for perception staleness during both training and inference. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively replace traditional chunk-based action heads for both specialist and generalist policies. AR-VLA exhibits superior history awareness and substantially smoother action trajectories while maintaining or exceeding the task success rates of state-of-the-art reactive VLAs. Overall, our work introduces a scalable, context-aware action generation schema that provides a robust structural foundation for training effective robotic policies. Code and Videos available at https://arvla.insait.ai

Video-Action Models (VAMs) leverage the broad visual dynamics captured by pre-trained video diffusion models, offering a promising path toward generalizable robot manipulation. However, RGB-only video rollouts are not directly actionable: they leave metric 3D motion, contact geometry, and fine-grained spatial constraints under-specified, making action grounding ambiguous. Meanwhile, scaling action supervision across diverse tasks and embodiments remains costly. We present PointAction, a framework that bridges video predictions to robot actions through explicit point-based 4D modeling. PointAction fine-tunes a foundation video generation model to jointly predict future RGB frames and dynamic 3D pointmaps, producing temporally consistent 3D motion of task-relevant scene geometry. These point dynamics serve as a structured, embodiment-agnostic action interface, which a diffusion-based action decoder maps to executable robot actions. By using metric 3D point dynamics as the interface between video prediction and control, PointAction reduces the ambiguity of RGB-only action grounding and supports transfer across tasks and embodiments with limited action supervision. Experiments show that PointAction achieves state-of-the-art 4D generation quality on robot scenes, outperforms existing baselines in simulation, and generalizes to two real robot arms unseen during pretraining.

Articulated object manipulation requires precise object interaction, where the object's axis must be carefully considered. Previous research employed interactive perception for manipulating articulated objects, but typically, open-loop approaches often suffer from overlooking the interaction dynamics. To address this limitation, we present a closed-loop pipeline integrating interactive perception with online axis estimation from segmented 3D point clouds. Our method leverages any interactive perception technique as a foundation for interactive perception, inducing slight object movement to generate point cloud frames of the evolving dynamic scene. These point clouds are then segmented using Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), after which the moving part of the object is masked for accurate motion online axis estimation, guiding subsequent robotic actions. Our approach significantly enhances the precision and efficiency of manipulation tasks involving articulated objects. Experiments in simulated environments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches, especially in tasks that demand precise axis-based control. Project Page: https://hytidel.github.io/video-tracking-for-axis-estimation/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically map visual observations and linguistic instructions directly to robotic control signals. This "black-box" mapping forces a single forward pass to simultaneously handle instruction interpretation, spatial grounding, and low-level control, often leading to poor spatial precision and limited robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose VP-VLA, a dual-system framework that decouples high-level reasoning and low-level execution via a structured visual prompting interface. Specifically, a "System 2 Planner" decomposes complex instructions into sub-tasks and identifies relevant target objects and goal locations. These spatial anchors are then overlaid directly onto visual observations as structured visual prompts, such as crosshairs and bounding boxes. Guided by these prompts and enhanced by a novel auxiliary visual grounding objective during training, a "System 1 Controller" reliably generates precise low-level execution motions. Experiments on the Robocasa-GR1-Tabletop benchmark and SimplerEnv simulation demonstrate that VP-VLA improves success rates by 5% and 8.3%, surpassing competitive baselines including QwenOFT and GR00T-N1.6.

Although LLMs demonstrate proficiency in several text-based reasoning and planning tasks, their implementation in robotics control is constrained by significant deficiencies: (1) LLM agents are designed to work mainly with textual inputs rather than visual conditions; (2) Current multimodal agents treat LLMs as static planners, which separates their reasoning from environment dynamics, resulting in actions that do not take domain-specific knowledge into account; and (3) LLMs are not designed to learn from visual interactions, which makes it harder for them to make better policies for specific domains. In this paper, we introduce EMAC+, an Embodied Multimodal Agent that collaboratively integrates LLM and VLM via a bidirectional training paradigm. Unlike existing methods, EMAC+ dynamically refines high-level textual plans generated by an LLM using real-time feedback from a VLM executing low-level visual control tasks. We address critical limitations of previous models by enabling the LLM to internalize visual environment dynamics directly through interactive experience, rather than relying solely on static symbolic mappings. Extensive experimental evaluations on ALFWorld and RT-1 benchmarks demonstrate that EMAC+ achieves superior task performance, robustness against noisy observations, and efficient learning. We also conduct thorough ablation studies and provide detailed analyses of success and failure cases.

This paper addresses the inherent inference latency challenges associated with deploying multimodal large language models (MLLM) in quadruped vision-language-action (QUAR-VLA) tasks. Our investigation reveals that conventional parameter reduction techniques ultimately impair the performance of the language foundation model during the action instruction tuning phase, making them unsuitable for this purpose. We introduce a novel latency-free quadruped MLLM model, dubbed QUART-Online, designed to enhance inference efficiency without degrading the performance of the language foundation model. By incorporating Action Chunk Discretization (ACD), we compress the original action representation space, mapping continuous action values onto a smaller set of discrete representative vectors while preserving critical information. Subsequently, we fine-tune the MLLM to integrate vision, language, and compressed actions into a unified semantic space. Experimental results demonstrate that QUART-Online operates in tandem with the existing MLLM system, achieving real-time inference in sync with the underlying controller frequency, significantly boosting the success rate across various tasks by 65%. Our project page is https://quart-online.github.io.

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown potential in leveraging pretrained vision-language models and diverse robot demonstrations for learning generalizable sensorimotor control. While this paradigm effectively utilizes large-scale data from both robotic and non-robotic sources, current VLAs primarily focus on direct input--output mappings, lacking the intermediate reasoning steps crucial for complex manipulation tasks. As a result, existing VLAs lack temporal planning or reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a method that incorporates explicit visual chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning into vision-language-action models (VLAs) by predicting future image frames autoregressively as visual goals before generating a short action sequence to achieve these goals. We introduce CoT-VLA, a state-of-the-art 7B VLA that can understand and generate visual and action tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoT-VLA achieves strong performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art VLA model by 17% in real-world manipulation tasks and 6% in simulation benchmarks. Project website: https://cot-vla.github.io/

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

Offline reinforcement learning has shown great promise in leveraging large pre-collected datasets for policy learning, allowing agents to forgo often-expensive online data collection. However, to date, offline reinforcement learning from visual observations with continuous action spaces has been relatively under-explored, and there is a lack of understanding of where the remaining challenges lie. In this paper, we seek to establish simple baselines for continuous control in the visual domain. We show that simple modifications to two state-of-the-art vision-based online reinforcement learning algorithms, DreamerV2 and DrQ-v2, suffice to outperform prior work and establish a competitive baseline. We rigorously evaluate these algorithms on both existing offline datasets and a new testbed for offline reinforcement learning from visual observations that better represents the data distributions present in real-world offline RL problems, and open-source our code and data to facilitate progress in this important domain. Finally, we present and analyze several key desiderata unique to offline RL from visual observations, including visual distractions and visually identifiable changes in dynamics.

To make effective decisions in novel environments with long-horizon goals, it is crucial to engage in hierarchical reasoning across spatial and temporal scales. This entails planning abstract subgoal sequences, visually reasoning about the underlying plans, and executing actions in accordance with the devised plan through visual-motor control. We propose Compositional Foundation Models for Hierarchical Planning (HiP), a foundation model which leverages multiple expert foundation model trained on language, vision and action data individually jointly together to solve long-horizon tasks. We use a large language model to construct symbolic plans that are grounded in the environment through a large video diffusion model. Generated video plans are then grounded to visual-motor control, through an inverse dynamics model that infers actions from generated videos. To enable effective reasoning within this hierarchy, we enforce consistency between the models via iterative refinement. We illustrate the efficacy and adaptability of our approach in three different long-horizon table-top manipulation tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, in which reliable action prediction critically depends on accurately interpreting and integrating visual observations conditioned on language instructions. Although recent works have sought to enhance the visual capabilities of VLA models, most approaches treat the LLM backbone as a black box, providing limited insight into how visual information is grounded into action generation. Therefore, we perform a systematic analysis of multiple VLA models across different action-generation paradigms and observe that sensitivity to visual tokens progressively decreases in deeper layers during action generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DeepVision-VLA, built on a Vision-Language Mixture-of-Transformers (VL-MoT) framework. This framework enables shared attention between the vision foundation model and the VLA backbone, injecting multi-level visual features from the vision expert into deeper layers of the VLA backbone to enhance visual representations for precise and complex manipulation. In addition, we introduce Action-Guided Visual Pruning (AGVP), which leverages shallow-layer attention to prune irrelevant visual tokens while preserving task-relevant ones, reinforcing critical visual cues for manipulation with minimal computational overhead. DeepVision-VLA outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by 9.0\% and 7.5\% on simulated and real-world tasks, respectively, providing new insights for the design of visually enhanced VLA models.

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured representation and generation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in periodic or quasi-periodic motions. The motion dynamics in a continuously parameterized latent space enable our method to enhance the interpolation and generalization capabilities of motion learning algorithms. The motion learning controller, informed by the motion parameterization, operates online tracking of a wide range of motions, including targets unseen during training. With a fallback mechanism, the controller dynamically adapts its tracking strategy and automatically resorts to safe action execution when a potentially risky target is proposed. By leveraging the identified spatial-temporal structure, our work opens new possibilities for future advancements in general motion representation and learning algorithms.

This work highlights that video world modeling, alongside vision-language pre-training, establishes a fresh and independent foundation for robot learning. Intuitively, video world models provide the ability to imagine the near future by understanding the causality between actions and visual dynamics. Inspired by this, we introduce LingBot-VA, an autoregressive diffusion framework that learns frame prediction and policy execution simultaneously. Our model features three carefully crafted designs: (1) a shared latent space, integrating vision and action tokens, driven by a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, (2) a closed-loop rollout mechanism, allowing for ongoing acquisition of environmental feedback with ground-truth observations, (3) an asynchronous inference pipeline, parallelizing action prediction and motor execution to support efficient control. We evaluate our model on both simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios, where it shows significant promise in long-horizon manipulation, data efficiency in post-training, and strong generalizability to novel configurations. The code and model are made publicly available to facilitate the community.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models built upon Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have achieved remarkable success in advancing general-purpose robotic agents, owing to its significant perceptual comprehension. Recently, since text-only CoT struggles to adequately capture scene details in complex spatial environments, a highly promising strategy involves leveraging visual priors to guide robotic action generation. Nevertheless, these strategies face two inherent challenges: (i) a modality gap between visual observations and low-level actions, and (ii) unstable training due to competing objectives between visual prediction and action generation. To address these challenges, we propose a Vision-Integrated Trajectory Alignment (VITA) framework that learns a shared discrete latent space for vision and action, enabling joint modeling of perception and motor control. VITA introduces a implicit visual CoT: autoregressively generated tokens is simultaneously decoded into future frames predictions and robot actions, thereby internalizing visual dynamics as an inductive bias for motion planning. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world environments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. VITA improves 14.5\%, 9.6\% and 12.1\% over existing baselines on CALVIN, LIBERO and SimplerEnv. Furthermore, VITA attains an average success rate of 80.5\% across six real-world tasks, demonstrating its potential as a generalist robotic manipulation model.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop reliability often degrades under local deployment conditions. Existing evaluations typically treat test episodes as independent zero-shot trials. However, real robots often operate repeatedly in the same or slowly changing environments, where successful executions provide environment-verified evidence of reliable behavior patterns. We study this persistent-deployment setting, asking whether a partially competent frozen VLA can improve its reliability by reusing its successful test-time experience. We propose an online success-memory guided test-time adaptation framework for generative VLAs. During deployment, the robot stores progress-calibrated successful observation-action segments in a long-term memory. At inference, it retrieves state-relevant action chunks, filters inconsistent candidates via trajectory-level consistency, and aggregates them into an elite action prior. To incorporate this prior into action generation, we introduce confidence-adaptive prior guidance, which injects the elite prior into an intermediate state of the flow-matching action sampler and adjusts the guidance strength based on retrieval confidence. This design allows the frozen VLA to exploit environment-specific successful experience while preserving observation-conditioned generative refinement. This retrieve-then-steer mechanism enables lightweight, non-parametric test-time adaptation without requiring parameter updates. Simulation and real-world experiments show improved task success and closed-loop stability, especially in long-horizon and multi-stage tasks.

Despite tremendous progress in dexterous manipulation, current visuomotor policies remain fundamentally limited by two challenges: they struggle to generalize under perceptual or behavioral distribution shifts, and their performance is constrained by the size of human demonstration data. In this paper, we use video generation as a proxy for robot policy learning to address both limitations simultaneously. We propose Video Policy, a modular framework that combines video and action generation that can be trained end-to-end. Our results demonstrate that learning to generate videos of robot behavior allows for the extraction of policies with minimal demonstration data, significantly improving robustness and sample efficiency. Our method shows strong generalization to unseen objects, backgrounds, and tasks, both in simulation and the real world. We further highlight that task success is closely tied to the generated video, with action-free video data providing critical benefits for generalizing to novel tasks. By leveraging large-scale video generative models, we achieve superior performance compared to traditional behavior cloning, paving the way for more scalable and data-efficient robot policy learning.

Latent actions serve as an intermediate representation that enables consistent modeling of vision-language-action (VLA) models across heterogeneous datasets. However, approaches to supervising VLAs with latent actions are fragmented and lack a systematic comparison. This work structures the study of latent action supervision from two perspectives: (i) regularizing the trajectory via image-based latent actions, and (ii) unifying the target space with action-based latent actions. Under a unified VLA baseline, we instantiate and compare four representative integration strategies. Our results reveal a formulation-task correspondence: image-based latent actions benefit long-horizon reasoning and scene-level generalization, whereas action-based latent actions excel at complex motor coordination. Furthermore, we find that directly supervising the VLM with discrete latent action tokens yields the most effective performance. Finally, our experiments offer initial insights into the benefits of latent action supervision in mixed-data, suggesting a promising direction for VLA training. Code is available at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/From_Pixels_to_Tokens.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While recent efforts introduce various forms of visual planning to address this issue, existing approaches either rely on global geometric cues, symbolic intermediate representations, or externally generated visual signals, which are often weakly coupled with downstream action prediction. In this work, we revisit visual planning in VLA systems and argue that effective planning should be local, visually grounded, internally generated, and directly aligned with action. Based on this insight, we propose Afford-VLA, a unified framework that internalizes task-conditioned affordance as an explicit visual planning interface within VLA models. Concretely, we introduce learnable <AFF> tokens to query task-relevant interaction regions, decode affordance masks from multimodal features, and convert them into compact embeddings that directly condition action generation. This design enables affordance to be both generated and utilized within the VLA, forming a tightly coupled perception-action pathway. To further support this integration, we adopt a training strategy that allows the affordance pathway to be jointly optimized with action prediction, improving its effectiveness for downstream control. We evaluate our method on multiple simulation benchmarks, including LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance, along with strong real-world results. These findings demonstrate that internalizing affordance as action-aligned visual planning provides a powerful paradigm for improving VLA systems.

The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

Existing methods for human motion control in video generation typically rely on either 2D poses or explicit 3D parametric models (e.g., SMPL) as control signals. However, 2D poses rigidly bind motion to the driving viewpoint, precluding novel-view synthesis. Explicit 3D models, though structurally informative, suffer from inherent inaccuracies (e.g., depth ambiguity and inaccurate dynamics) which, when used as a strong constraint, override the powerful intrinsic 3D awareness of large-scale video generators. In this work, we revisit motion control from a 3D-aware perspective, advocating for an implicit, view-agnostic motion representation that naturally aligns with the generator's spatial priors rather than depending on externally reconstructed constraints. We introduce 3DiMo, which jointly trains a motion encoder with a pretrained video generator to distill driving frames into compact, view-agnostic motion tokens, injected semantically via cross-attention. To foster 3D awareness, we train with view-rich supervision (i.e., single-view, multi-view, and moving-camera videos), forcing motion consistency across diverse viewpoints. Additionally, we use auxiliary geometric supervision that leverages SMPL only for early initialization and is annealed to zero, enabling the model to transition from external 3D guidance to learning genuine 3D spatial motion understanding from the data and the generator's priors. Experiments confirm that 3DiMo faithfully reproduces driving motions with flexible, text-driven camera control, significantly surpassing existing methods in both motion fidelity and visual quality.

Recent advancements in video generation models have significantly improved their ability to follow text prompts. However, the customization of dynamic visual effects, defined as temporally evolving and appearance-driven visual phenomena like object crushing or explosion, remains underexplored. Prior works on motion customization or control mainly focus on low-level motions of the subject or camera, which can be guided using explicit control signals such as motion trajectories. In contrast, dynamic visual effects involve higher-level semantics that are more naturally suited for control via text prompts. However, it is hard and time-consuming for humans to craft a single prompt that accurately specifies these effects, as they require complex temporal reasoning and iterative refinement over time. To address this challenge, we propose P-Flow, a novel training-free framework for customizing dynamic visual effects in video generation without modifying the underlying model. By leveraging the semantic and temporal reasoning capabilities of vision-language models, P-Flow performs test-time prompt optimization, refining prompts based on the discrepancy between the visual effects of the reference video and the generated output. Through iterative refinement, the prompts evolve to better induce the desired dynamic effect in novel scenes. Experiments demonstrate that P-Flow achieves high-fidelity and diverse visual effect customization and outperforms other models on both text-to-video and image-to-video generation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/showlab/P-Flow.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

We present Chain-of-Action (CoA), a novel visuo-motor policy paradigm built upon Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling. Unlike conventional approaches that predict next step action(s) forward, CoA generates an entire trajectory by explicit backward reasoning with task-specific goals through an action-level Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process. This process is unified within a single autoregressive structure: (1) the first token corresponds to a stable keyframe action that encodes the task-specific goals; and (2) subsequent action tokens are generated autoregressively, conditioned on the initial keyframe and previously predicted actions. This backward action reasoning enforces a global-to-local structure, allowing each local action to be tightly constrained by the final goal. To further realize the action reasoning structure, CoA incorporates four complementary designs: continuous action token representation; dynamic stopping for variable-length trajectory generation; reverse temporal ensemble; and multi-token prediction to balance action chunk modeling with global structure. As a result, CoA gives strong spatial generalization capabilities while preserving the flexibility and simplicity of a visuo-motor policy. Empirically, we observe CoA achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 60 RLBench tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks.

Humans perform long-horizon manipulation by retaining knowledge of what earlier actions have established while continuously adapting the motion underway. By contrast, action-chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly replan from the current input at each query. Existing methods preserve either long-term task evidence through memory or short-term motion through action reuse and ensembling, leaving the cross-query handoff incomplete. We introduce ChainVLA, a 1.2B-parameter VLA policy that chains successive queries through a joint and revisable execution state. Progress Context combines a recurrent Working State with sparse event memory to carry observation-derived task progress, while Motion Tail feeds the preceding prediction's unexecuted continuation into state construction and action generation. Together, the two components condition a decoder that regenerates each action horizon under the latest observation, allowing the carried state to guide the next prediction without fixing it. ChainVLA reaches 62.8% average success on RMBench and 98.8% across four LIBERO suites, while removing Motion Tail or Progress Context reduces RMBench success to 11.2% and 3.0%, respectively. These asymmetric ablations are consistent with motion continuity helping preserve the observation stream from which task progress is inferred.

Active perception and manipulation are crucial for robots to interact with complex scenes. Existing methods struggle to unify semantic-driven active perception with robust, viewpoint-invariant execution. We propose SaPaVe, an end-to-end framework that jointly learns these capabilities in a data-efficient manner. Our approach decouples camera and manipulation actions rather than placing them in a shared action space, and follows a bottom-up training strategy: we first train semantic camera control on a large-scale dataset, then jointly optimize both action types using hybrid data. To support this framework, we introduce ActiveViewPose-200K, a dataset of 200k image-language-camera movement pairs for semantic camera movement learning, and a 3D geometry-aware module that improves execution robustness under dynamic viewpoints. We also present ActiveManip-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating active manipulation beyond fixed-view settings. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that SaPaVe outperforms recent vision-language-action models such as GR00T N1 and \(π_0\), achieving up to 31.25\% higher success rates in real-world tasks. These results show that tightly coupled perception and execution, when trained with decoupled yet coordinated strategies, enable efficient and generalizable active manipulation. Project page: https://lmzpai.github.io/SaPaVe

Current video generation models cannot simulate physical consequences of 3D actions like forces and robotic manipulations, as they lack structural understanding of how actions affect 3D scenes. We present RealWonder, the first real-time system for action-conditioned video generation from a single image. Our key insight is using physics simulation as an intermediate bridge: instead of directly encoding continuous actions, we translate them through physics simulation into visual representations (optical flow and RGB) that video models can process. RealWonder integrates three components: 3D reconstruction from single images, physics simulation, and a distilled video generator requiring only 4 diffusion steps. Our system achieves 13.2 FPS at 480x832 resolution, enabling interactive exploration of forces, robot actions, and camera controls on rigid objects, deformable bodies, fluids, and granular materials. We envision RealWonder opens new opportunities to apply video models in immersive experiences, AR/VR, and robot learning. Our code and model weights are publicly available in our project website: https://liuwei283.github.io/RealWonder/

Video generative models have emerged as a promising robotics backbone, capable of generating videos that depict the completion of complex tasks across embodiments and environments. Recent work proposes robot foundation models that jointly predict future observations and actions by finetuning video models with action-labeled data. In this paper, we test the limits of an alternative approach: leave the video planner as-is while training an embodiment-specific inverse dynamics model (IDM). This decoupling offers several natural benefits: the video planner remains embodiment-agnostic, different video models can be interchanged easily without re-training the IDM, and the IDM can be independently trained with readily available self-play data. We present a closed-loop, video-to-action policy that combines an action-free video world model with a carefully-designed IDM based on the robot embodiment Jacobian. We demonstrate that our IDM design is both data-efficient and scalable to high-dimensional action spaces. Our policy, which we coin the Video-to-Embodied Robot Action Model (VERA), achieves strong performance across simulated and real-world benchmarks, including zero-shot Panda arm manipulation and 16-DoF Allegro-hand dexterous cube re-orientation. The same video planner can be used across multiple embodiments by pairing it with different embodiment-specific IDMs. Our results show that decoupled video planning plus faithful video-to-action translation is a viable alternative route towards zero-shot, cross-embodiment, and generalizable robot control. More results are available on our project website: https://vera.csail.mit.edu.

We propose a unified framework for motion control in video generation that seamlessly integrates camera movement, object-level translation, and fine-grained local motion using trajectory-based inputs. In contrast to prior methods that address these motion types through separate modules or task-specific designs, our approach offers a cohesive solution by projecting user-defined trajectories into the latent space of pre-trained image-to-video generation models via a lightweight motion injector. Users can specify keypoints and their motion paths to control localized deformations, entire object motion, virtual camera dynamics, or combinations of these. The injected trajectory signals guide the generative process to produce temporally consistent and semantically aligned motion sequences. Our framework demonstrates superior performance across multiple video motion control tasks, including stylized motion effects (e.g., motion brushes), dynamic viewpoint changes, and precise local motion manipulation. Experiments show that our method provides significantly better controllability and visual quality compared to prior approaches and commercial solutions, while remaining broadly compatible with various state-of-the-art video generation backbones. Project page: https://anytraj.github.io/.

Language-conditioned quadrotor flight requires a policy to ground semantic goals, anticipate the visual consequences of ego-motion, and output control references that remain smooth and dynamically executable under rapidly changing first-person views. Existing aerial vision-language navigation and vision-language-action methods commonly use discrete actions, high-level waypoints, or instantaneous velocity commands, which provide limited supervision about how flight actions change future observations. We present AeroAct, an action-centered world-action model (WAM) for quadrotor navigation. To the best of our knowledge, AeroAct is the first WAM instantiated and demonstrated for real-world aerial flight. The model adapts a pretrained video diffusion Transformer to predict local trajectory-action chunks from egocentric visual history, proprioception, and language. Future first-person frames are used during training as dense consequence supervision, while deployment directly decodes actions without generating future video. To obtain aligned visual, state, language, and dynamically feasible action data, we build a DiffAero-based pipeline with complementary Isaac Lab and 3D Gaussian splatting renderers. We further introduce a low-cost handheld collection device that couples camera observations with motion estimates to recreate flight-like egocentric trajectories, and a self-guidance procedure that improves temporal consistency across overlapping trajectory chunks. Closed-loop simulation and real-world experiments show that temporal visual context improves target tracking and object-search performance, and that WAM-based policies can be executed on a physical quadrotor.

Leveraging temporal context is crucial for success in partially observable robotic tasks. However, prior work in behavior cloning has demonstrated inconsistent performance gains when using multi-frame observations. In this paper, we introduce ContextVLA, a policy model that robustly improves robotic task performance by effectively leveraging multi-frame observations. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that Vision-Language-Action models (VLA), i.e., policy models built upon a Vision-Language Model (VLM), more effectively utilize multi-frame observations for action generation. This suggests that VLMs' inherent temporal understanding capability enables them to extract more meaningful context from multi-frame observations. However, the high dimensionality of video inputs introduces significant computational overhead, making VLA training and inference inefficient. To address this, ContextVLA compresses past observations into a single context token, allowing the policy to efficiently leverage temporal context for action generation. Our experiments show that ContextVLA consistently improves over single-frame VLAs and achieves the benefits of full multi-frame training but with reduced training and inference times.

Effectively handling the interplay between spatial perception and action generation remains a critical bottleneck in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically treat spatial perception and action execution as decoupled or strictly unidirectional processes, fundamentally restricting a robot's ability to master complex manipulation tasks. To address this, we propose X-Imitator, a versatile dual-path framework that models spatial perception and action execution as a tightly coupled bidirectional loop. By reciprocally conditioning current pose predictions on past actions and vice versa, this framework enables continuous mutual refinement between spatial reasoning and action generation. This joint modeling exactly mimics human internal forward models. Designed as a modular architecture, the system can be seamlessly integrated into various visuomotor policies. Extensive experiments across 24 simulated and 3 real-world tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms both vanilla policies and prior methods utilizing explicit pose guidance. The code will be open sourced.

We present ShadowDancer, a novel approach to any-action, frame-level control of interactive video world models. The obstacle is representational: existing interfaces either encode an action loosely, leaving how it unfolds for the model to improvise, or encode it exactly through structured signals that serve one family and are hard to acquire, so precise control across diverse dynamics remains impractical. Demonstration videos are the natural remedy, specifying any dynamics frame by frame; yet a video shows its dynamics only through one particular appearance, a single shadow of the underlying dynamics, so actions learned from demonstrations transfer poorly to new scenes. ShadowDancer addresses this with two key innovations: (1) shadow pairs, video pairs that replay the same dynamics under independently resampled appearance, constructed at scale by our Shadow Library, so that a dynamics family becomes controllable exactly when such pairs can be constructed for it; and (2) cross-shadow prediction, which learns actions by predicting one shadow from the other, so that whatever the pairing resamples is discarded by construction and whatever it preserves becomes the action, yielding a unified dynamics representation that drives a block-causal world model. Any demonstrated clip thus becomes a reusable action asset, replayed in new environments without action labels, motion estimators, or fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate improved action transfer and long action rollout over strong latent-action and interactive world model baselines across diverse dynamics families, with an average blinded win rate of 86% in rollout comparisons. We show video results at https://ShadowDancer-1.github.io

Video generative models pre-trained on large-scale internet datasets have achieved remarkable success, excelling at producing realistic synthetic videos. However, they often generate clips based on static prompts (e.g., text or images), limiting their ability to model interactive and dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we propose Dynamic World Simulation (DWS), a novel approach to transform pre-trained video generative models into controllable world simulators capable of executing specified action trajectories. To achieve precise alignment between conditioned actions and generated visual changes, we introduce a lightweight, universal action-conditioned module that seamlessly integrates into any existing model. Instead of focusing on complex visual details, we demonstrate that consistent dynamic transition modeling is the key to building powerful world simulators. Building upon this insight, we further introduce a motion-reinforced loss that enhances action controllability by compelling the model to capture dynamic changes more effectively. Experiments demonstrate that DWS can be versatilely applied to both diffusion and autoregressive transformer models, achieving significant improvements in generating action-controllable, dynamically consistent videos across games and robotics domains. Moreover, to facilitate the applications of the learned world simulator in downstream tasks such as model-based reinforcement learning, we propose prioritized imagination to improve sample efficiency, demonstrating competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

We present a framework for visual action planning of complex manipulation tasks with high-dimensional state spaces, focusing on manipulation of deformable objects. We propose a Latent Space Roadmap (LSR) for task planning which is a graph-based structure globally capturing the system dynamics in a low-dimensional latent space. Our framework consists of three parts: (1) a Mapping Module (MM) that maps observations given in the form of images into a structured latent space extracting the respective states as well as generates observations from the latent states, (2) the LSR which builds and connects clusters containing similar states in order to find the latent plans between start and goal states extracted by MM, and (3) the Action Proposal Module that complements the latent plan found by the LSR with the corresponding actions. We present a thorough investigation of our framework on simulated box stacking and rope/box manipulation tasks, and a folding task executed on a real robot.

Teaching robots to autonomously complete everyday tasks remains a challenge. Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful approach that imbues robots with skills via demonstrations, but is limited by the labor-intensive process of collecting teleoperated robot data. Human videos offer a scalable alternative, but it remains difficult to directly train IL policies from them due to the lack of robot action labels. To address this, we propose to represent actions as short-horizon 2D trajectories on an image. These actions, or motion tracks, capture the predicted direction of motion for either human hands or robot end-effectors. We instantiate an IL policy called Motion Track Policy (MT-pi) which receives image observations and outputs motion tracks as actions. By leveraging this unified, cross-embodiment action space, MT-pi completes tasks with high success given just minutes of human video and limited additional robot demonstrations. At test time, we predict motion tracks from two camera views, recovering 6DoF trajectories via multi-view synthesis. MT-pi achieves an average success rate of 86.5% across 4 real-world tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art IL baselines which do not leverage human data or our action space by 40%, and generalizes to scenarios seen only in human videos. Code and videos are available on our website https://portal-cornell.github.io/motion_track_policy/.

Effectively retrieving, reasoning and understanding visually rich information remains a challenge for RAG methods. Traditional text-based methods cannot handle visual-related information. On the other hand, current vision-based RAG approaches are often limited by fixed pipelines and frequently struggle to reason effectively due to the insufficient activation of the fundamental capabilities of models. As RL has been proven to be beneficial for model reasoning, we introduce VRAG-RL, a novel RL framework tailored for complex reasoning across visually rich information. With this framework, VLMs interact with search engines, autonomously sampling single-turn or multi-turn reasoning trajectories with the help of visual perception tokens and undergoing continual optimization based on these samples. Our approach highlights key limitations of RL in RAG domains: (i) Prior Multi-modal RAG approaches tend to merely incorporate images into the context, leading to insufficient reasoning token allocation and neglecting visual-specific perception; and (ii) When models interact with search engines, their queries often fail to retrieve relevant information due to the inability to articulate requirements, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we define an action space tailored for visually rich inputs, with actions including cropping and scaling, allowing the model to gather information from a coarse-to-fine perspective. Furthermore, to bridge the gap between users' original inquiries and the retriever, we employ a simple yet effective reward that integrates query rewriting and retrieval performance with a model-based reward. Our VRAG-RL optimizes VLMs for RAG tasks using specially designed RL strategies, aligning the model with real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/VRAG.

Visual prediction has emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control, where future observations are generated and then translated into actions. However, dense video generation is computationally expensive and often unnecessary for many manipulation tasks, whose progress can be summarized by a small number of task-relevant visual states. In this work, we study whether image editing models can serve as sparse visual world models for robot manipulation by predicting task-level future states without dense video rollout. We first conduct a controlled comparison between the video generation model Wan2.2 and the image editing model FLUX-Kontext under the same robotic data setting, and find that image editing produces more reliable task-level keyframes with better visual fidelity and substantially lower inference cost. Motivated by this observation, we propose SWEET, a one-shot sparse visual planning framework that progressively generates a sequence of task-relevant manipulation keyframes through successive image editing, conditioned on language instructions and optional arrow-based spatial guidance. A goal-conditioned diffusion action predictor then converts adjacent imagined keyframes into executable action chunks. To reduce the mismatch between real and edited visual subgoals, we further introduce a mixed-training strategy with filtered edited targets. Experiments on DROID and RoboMimic show that SWEET improves keyframe prediction across seen and unseen scenes and enables a full pipeline from sequential keyframe planning to executable robot actions, suggesting that image editing is a promising and underexplored direction for embodied visual prediction.

While humans can flexibly leverage interactive visual cognition for complex problem-solving, enabling Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to learn similarly adaptive behaviors with visual tools remains challenging. A significant hurdle is the current lack of standardized infrastructure, which hinders integrating diverse tools, generating rich interaction data, and training robust agents effectively. To address these gaps, we introduce OpenThinkIMG, the first open-source, comprehensive end-to-end framework for tool-augmented LVLMs. It features standardized vision tool interfaces, scalable trajectory generation for policy initialization, and a flexible training environment. Furthermore, considering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on static demonstrations offers limited policy generalization for dynamic tool invocation, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework V-ToolRL to train LVLMs to learn adaptive policies for invoking external vision tools. V-ToolRL enables LVLMs to autonomously discover optimal tool-usage strategies by directly optimizing for task success using feedback from tool interactions. We empirically validate V-ToolRL on challenging chart reasoning tasks. Our RL-trained agent, built upon a Qwen2-VL-2B, significantly outperforms its SFT-initialized counterpart (+28.83 points) and surpasses established supervised tool-learning baselines like Taco and CogCom by an average of +12.7 points. Notably, it also surpasses prominent closed-source models like GPT-4.1 by +8.68 accuracy points. We hope OpenThinkIMG can serve as a foundational framework for advancing dynamic, tool-augmented visual reasoning, helping the community develop AI agents that can genuinely "think with images".

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks--minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, Unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table height that unseen in train data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show potential for general robotic tasks, but remain challenging in spatiotemporally coherent manipulation, which requires fine-grained representations. Typically, existing methods embed 3D positions into visual representations to enhance the spatial precision of actions. However, these methods struggle to achieve temporally coherent control over action execution. In this work, we propose VLA-4D, a general VLA model with 4D awareness for spatiotemporally coherent robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) 4D-aware visual representation. We extract visual features, embed 1D time into 3D positions for 4D embeddings, and fuse them into a unified visual representation via a cross-attention mechanism. 2) Spatiotemporal action representation. We extend conventional spatial action representations with temporal information to enable the spatiotemporal planning, and align the multimodal representations into the LLM for spatiotemporal action prediction. Within this unified framework, the designed visual and action representations jointly make robotic manipulation spatially-smooth and temporally-coherent. In addition, we extend the VLA dataset with temporal action annotations for fine-tuning our model. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the superiority of our method across different tasks of robotic manipulation.

We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dynamic transferability, we propose to "render" actions into precise visual prompts as domain-agnostic representations that preserve both geometric precision and cross-domain adaptability for complex actions; specifically, we choose visual skeletons for their generality and accessibility. We propose robust pipelines to construct skeletons from two interaction-rich data sources - human-object interactions (HOI) and dexterous robotic manipulation - enabling cross-domain training of action-driven generative models. By integrating visual skeletons into pretrained video generation models via lightweight fine-tuning, we enable precise action control of complex interaction while preserving the learning of cross-domain dynamics. Experiments on EgoVid, RT-1 and DROID demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/VAP/.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in embodied manipulation. However, most existing VLA policies rely on limited observation windows and end-to-end action prediction, which makes them brittle in long-horizon, memory-dependent tasks with partial observability, occlusions, and multi-stage dependencies. Such tasks require not only precise visuomotor control, but also persistent memory, adaptive task decomposition, and explicit recovery from execution failures. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-system framework for long-horizon embodied manipulation. Our framework explicitly separates high-level semantic reasoning from low-level motor execution. A high-level planner, implemented as a VLM-based agentic module, maintains structured task memory and performs goal decomposition, outcome verification, and error-driven correction. A low-level executor, instantiated as a VLA-based visuomotor controller, carries out each sub-task through diffusion-based action generation conditioned on geometry-preserving filtered observations. Together, the two systems form a closed loop between planning and execution, enabling memory-aware reasoning, adaptive replanning, and robust online recovery. Experiments on representative RMBench tasks show that the proposed framework substantially outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 32.4% average success rate compared with 9.8% for the strongest baseline. Ablation studies further confirm the importance of structured memory and closed-loop recovery for long-horizon manipulation.

Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchmarks adopt open-loop protocols that emphasize visual quality in isolation, leaving the core issue of embodied utility unresolved, i.e., do WMs actually help agents succeed at embodied tasks? To address this gap, we introduce World-in-World, the first open platform that benchmarks WMs in a closed-loop world that mirrors real agent-environment interactions. World-in-World provides a unified online planning strategy and a standardized action API, enabling heterogeneous WMs for decision making. We curate four closed-loop environments that rigorously evaluate diverse WMs, prioritize task success as the primary metric, and move beyond the common focus on visual quality; we also present the first data scaling law for world models in embodied settings. Our study uncovers three surprises: (1) visual quality alone does not guarantee task success, controllability matters more; (2) scaling post-training with action-observation data is more effective than upgrading the pretrained video generators; and (3) allocating more inference-time compute allows WMs to substantially improve closed-loop performance.

We introduce iFlyBot-VLA, a large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model trained under a novel framework. The main contributions are listed as follows: (1) a latent action model thoroughly trained on large-scale human and robotic manipulation videos; (2) a dual-level action representation framework that jointly supervises both the Vision-Language Model (VLM) and the action expert during training; (3) a mixed training strategy that combines robot trajectory data with general QA and spatial QA datasets, effectively enhancing the 3D perceptual and reasoning capabilities of the VLM backbone. Specifically, the VLM is trained to predict two complementary forms of actions: latent actions, derived from our latent action model pretrained on cross-embodiment manipulation data, which capture implicit high-level intentions; and structured discrete action tokens, obtained through frequency-domain transformations of continuous control signals, which encode explicit low-level dynamics. This dual supervision aligns the representation spaces of language, vision, and action, enabling the VLM to directly contribute to action generation. Experimental results on the LIBERO Franka benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our frame-work, while real-world evaluations further show that iFlyBot-VLA achieves competitive success rates across diverse and challenging manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we plan to open-source a portion of our self-constructed dataset to support future research in the community

One of the principal challenges in building VLM-powered GUI agents is visual grounding, i.e., localizing the appropriate screen region for action execution based on both the visual content and the textual plans. Most existing work formulates this as a text-based coordinate generation task. However, these approaches suffer from several limitations: weak spatial-semantic alignment, inability to handle ambiguous supervision targets, and a mismatch between the dense nature of screen coordinates and the coarse, patch-level granularity of visual features extracted by models like Vision Transformers. In this paper, we propose GUI-Actor, a VLM-based method for coordinate-free GUI grounding. At its core, GUI-Actor introduces an attention-based action head that learns to align a dedicated <ACTOR> token with all relevant visual patch tokens, enabling the model to propose one or more action regions in a single forward pass. In line with this, we further design a grounding verifier to evaluate and select the most plausible action region from the candidates proposed for action execution. Extensive experiments show that GUI-Actor outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on multiple GUI action grounding benchmarks, with improved generalization to unseen screen resolutions and layouts. Notably, GUI-Actor-7B even surpasses UI-TARS-72B (38.1) on ScreenSpot-Pro, achieving scores of 40.7 with Qwen2-VL and 44.6 with Qwen2.5-VL as backbones. Furthermore, by incorporating the verifier, we find that fine-tuning only the newly introduced action head (~100M parameters for 7B model) while keeping the VLM backbone frozen is sufficient to achieve performance comparable to previous state-of-the-art models, highlighting that GUI-Actor can endow the underlying VLM with effective grounding capabilities without compromising its general-purpose strengths.

Recent advances in video diffusion transformers have enabled interactive gaming world models that allow users to explore generated environments over extended horizons. However, existing approaches struggle with precise action control and long-horizon 3D consistency. Most prior works treat user actions as abstract conditioning signals, overlooking the fundamental geometric coupling between actions and the 3D world, whereby actions induce relative camera motions that accumulate into a global camera pose within a 3D world. In this paper, we establish camera pose as a unifying geometric representation to jointly ground immediate action control and long-term 3D consistency. First, we define a physics-based continuous action space and represent user inputs in the Lie algebra to derive precise 6-DoF camera poses, which are injected into the generative model via a camera embedder to ensure accurate action alignment. Second, we use global camera poses as spatial indices to retrieve relevant past observations, enabling geometrically consistent revisiting of locations during long-horizon navigation. To support this research, we introduce a large-scale dataset comprising 3,000 minutes of authentic human gameplay annotated with camera trajectories and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art interactive gaming world models in action controllability, long-horizon visual quality, and 3D spatial consistency.

Generating interaction-centric videos, such as those depicting humans or robots interacting with objects, is crucial for embodied intelligence, as they provide rich and diverse visual priors for robot learning, manipulation policy training, and affordance reasoning. However, existing methods often struggle to model such complex and dynamic interactions. While recent studies show that masks can serve as effective control signals and enhance generation quality, obtaining dense and precise mask annotations remains a major challenge for real-world use. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Mask2IV, a novel framework specifically designed for interaction-centric video generation. It adopts a decoupled two-stage pipeline that first predicts plausible motion trajectories for both actor and object, then generates a video conditioned on these trajectories. This design eliminates the need for dense mask inputs from users while preserving the flexibility to manipulate the interaction process. Furthermore, Mask2IV supports versatile and intuitive control, allowing users to specify the target object of interaction and guide the motion trajectory through action descriptions or spatial position cues. To support systematic training and evaluation, we curate two benchmarks covering diverse action and object categories across both human-object interaction and robotic manipulation scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior visual realism and controllability compared to existing baselines.

This paper shows that self-supervised visual pre-training from real-world images is effective for learning motor control tasks from pixels. We first train the visual representations by masked modeling of natural images. We then freeze the visual encoder and train neural network controllers on top with reinforcement learning. We do not perform any task-specific fine-tuning of the encoder; the same visual representations are used for all motor control tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-supervised model to exploit real-world images at scale for motor control. To accelerate progress in learning from pixels, we contribute a benchmark suite of hand-designed tasks varying in movements, scenes, and robots. Without relying on labels, state-estimation, or expert demonstrations, we consistently outperform supervised encoders by up to 80% absolute success rate, sometimes even matching the oracle state performance. We also find that in-the-wild images, e.g., from YouTube or Egocentric videos, lead to better visual representations for various manipulation tasks than ImageNet images.

Robotic manipulation requires anticipating how the environment evolves in response to actions, yet most existing systems lack this predictive capability, often resulting in errors and inefficiency. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide high-level guidance, they cannot explicitly forecast future states, and existing world models either predict only short horizons or produce spatially inconsistent frames. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for fast and predictive video-conditioned action. Our approach first selects and adapts a robust video generation model to ensure reliable future predictions, then applies adversarial distillation for fast, few-step video generation, and finally trains an action model that leverages both generated videos and real observations to correct spatial errors. Extensive experiments show that our method produces temporally coherent, spatially accurate video predictions that directly support precise manipulation, achieving significant improvements in embodiment consistency, spatial referring ability, and task completion over existing baselines. Codes & Models will be released.

Understanding and predicting motion is a fundamental component of visual intelligence. Although modern video models exhibit strong comprehension of scene dynamics, exploring multiple possible futures through full video synthesis remains prohibitively inefficient. We model scene dynamics orders of magnitude more efficiently by directly operating on a long-term motion embedding that is learned from large-scale trajectories obtained from tracker models. This enables efficient generation of long, realistic motions that fulfill goals specified via text prompts or spatial pokes. To achieve this, we first learn a highly compressed motion embedding with a temporal compression factor of 64x. In this space, we train a conditional flow-matching model to generate motion latents conditioned on task descriptions. The resulting motion distributions outperform those of both state-of-the-art video models and specialized task-specific approaches.

Existing Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising performance in zero-shot scenarios, demonstrating impressive task execution and reasoning capabilities. However, a significant challenge arises from the limitations of visual encoding, which can result in failures during tasks such as object grasping. Moreover, these models typically suffer from high computational overhead due to their large sizes, often exceeding 7B parameters. While these models excel in reasoning and task planning, the substantial computational overhead they incur makes them impractical for real-time robotic environments, where speed and efficiency are paramount. To address the limitations of existing VLA models, we propose NORA, a 3B-parameter model designed to reduce computational overhead while maintaining strong task performance. NORA adopts the Qwen-2.5-VL-3B multimodal model as its backbone, leveraging its superior visual-semantic understanding to enhance visual reasoning and action grounding. Additionally, our is trained on 970k real-world robot demonstrations and equipped with the FAST+ tokenizer for efficient action sequence generation. Experimental results demonstrate that NORA outperforms existing large-scale VLA models, achieving better task performance with significantly reduced computational overhead, making it a more practical solution for real-time robotic autonomy.

Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language. However, their generalization remains limited when applied to novel objects or unfamiliar environments that lie outside the training distribution. To address this, many existing approaches integrate additional components such as depth estimation, segmentation, or even diffusion to improve generalization, at the cost of adding significant computation overhead, resulting in low efficiency. This motivates the exploration of efficient action prediction methods, which are independent of additional high-level visual representations or diffusion techniques. In this work, we propose VOTE, an efficient and general framework for the optimization and acceleration of VLA models. In details, we propose a novel tokenizer-free fine-tuning approach for parallel accurate action prediction, which reduces computational overhead and accelerates inference speed. Additionally, we adopt an ensemble voting strategy for the action sampling, which significantly improves model performance and enhances generalization. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with 35x faster inference and 145 Hz throughput. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

Vision-language-action (VLA) reasoning tasks require agents to interpret multimodal instructions, perform long-horizon planning, and act adaptively in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically train VLA models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping inputs to actions without explicit reasoning, which hinders their ability to plan over multiple steps or adapt to complex task variations. In this paper, we propose ThinkAct, a dual-system framework that bridges high-level reasoning with low-level action execution via reinforced visual latent planning. ThinkAct trains a multimodal LLM to generate embodied reasoning plans guided by reinforcing action-aligned visual rewards based on goal completion and trajectory consistency. These reasoning plans are compressed into a visual plan latent that conditions a downstream action model for robust action execution on target environments. Extensive experiments on embodied reasoning and robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkAct enables few-shot adaptation, long-horizon planning, and self-correction behaviors in complex embodied AI tasks.

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.

Robots have to face challenging perceptual settings, including changes in viewpoint, lighting, and background. Current simulated reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks such as DM Control provide visual input without such complexity, which limits the transfer of well-performing methods to the real world. In this paper, we extend DM Control with three kinds of visual distractions (variations in background, color, and camera pose) to produce a new challenging benchmark for vision-based control, and we analyze state of the art RL algorithms in these settings. Our experiments show that current RL methods for vision-based control perform poorly under distractions, and that their performance decreases with increasing distraction complexity, showing that new methods are needed to cope with the visual complexities of the real world. We also find that combinations of multiple distraction types are more difficult than a mere combination of their individual effects.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) advance robotic manipulation by enriching intermediate representations with auxiliary spatial features or future visual-state prediction. However, these representations largely remain within the observation space and do not share the rigid-body geometry of the action space, forcing the action decoder to implicitly recover this geometry. We propose OASIS, a visuomotor policy that aligns the intermediate representation with the action space via SE(3) end-effector trajectory prediction. OASIS couples a 3D-aware feature encoder that fuses vision-language and metric-depth features with an SE(3) trajectory predictor that produces a camera-frame end-effector trajectory. Conditioned on the predictor's pose-supervised hidden states, the action decoder generates action chunks consistent with rigid-body motion. Across simulation and real-world experiments, OASIS outperforms VLA and WAM baselines in success rate and out-of-distribution generalization. Our project page is available at https://npuhandsome.github.io/OASIS_web.

We introduce the Do-Undo task and benchmark to address a critical gap in vision-language models: understanding and generating plausible scene transformations driven by real-world actions. Unlike prior work that relies on prompt-based image generation and editing to perform action-conditioned image manipulation, our training hypothesis requires models to simulate the outcome of a real-world action and then reverse it to the original state. This forward-reverse requirement tests genuine cause-and-effect understanding rather than stylistic or semantic edits. We curate a high-quality benchmark of reversible actions from real-world scenarios to enable robust action grounding. Our experiments reveal that current models struggle with action reversibility, highlighting the need to evaluate action understanding. Do-Undo provides an intuitive testbed for evaluating and advancing action-aware generation in multimodal systems that must reason about real-world dynamics.

The development of general robotic systems capable of manipulating in unstructured environments is a significant challenge. While Vision-Language Models(VLM) excel in high-level commonsense reasoning, they lack the fine-grained 3D spatial understanding required for precise manipulation tasks. Fine-tuning VLM on robotic datasets to create Vision-Language-Action Models(VLA) is a potential solution, but it is hindered by high data collection costs and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object-centric representation that bridges the gap between VLM's high-level reasoning and the low-level precision required for manipulation. Our key insight is that an object's canonical space, defined by its functional affordances, provides a structured and semantically meaningful way to describe interaction primitives, such as points and directions. These primitives act as a bridge, translating VLM's commonsense reasoning into actionable 3D spatial constraints. In this context, we introduce a dual closed-loop, open-vocabulary robotic manipulation system: one loop for high-level planning through primitive resampling, interaction rendering and VLM checking, and another for low-level execution via 6D pose tracking. This design ensures robust, real-time control without requiring VLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, highlighting the potential of this approach for automating large-scale simulation data generation.

Can we turn a video prediction model into a robot policy? Videos, including those of humans or teleoperated robots, capture rich physical interactions. However, most of them lack labeled actions, which limits their use in robot learning. We present Video Prediction for Robot Actions (ViPRA), a simple pretraining-finetuning framework that learns continuous robot control from these actionless videos. Instead of directly predicting actions, we train a video-language model to predict both future visual observations and motion-centric latent actions, which serve as intermediate representations of scene dynamics. We train these latent actions using perceptual losses and optical flow consistency to ensure they reflect physically grounded behavior. For downstream control, we introduce a chunked flow matching decoder that maps latent actions to robot-specific continuous action sequences, using only 100 to 200 teleoperated demonstrations. This approach avoids expensive action annotation, supports generalization across embodiments, and enables smooth, high-frequency continuous control upto 22 Hz via chunked action decoding. Unlike prior latent action works that treat pretraining as autoregressive policy learning, explicitly models both what changes and how. Our method outperforms strong baselines, with a 16% gain on the SIMPLER benchmark and a 13% improvement across real world manipulation tasks. We will release models and code at https://vipra-project.github.io

Generalist robot policies exhibit strong capabilities, but their robustness in complex and unseen environments remains limited. Scaling robot learning and evaluation in diverse real-world environments remains costly and challenging. Action-conditioned world models offer a promising alternative, but they often suffer from limited action controllability and poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To this end, we present GeniWorld, an interactive world model for robots that generalizes robustly across unseen scenarios. Building on pretrained video generative models, we use URDF-based rendering to transform numerical actions into visual action representations, enabling spatially grounded action control. By explicitly decoupling embodiment kinematics from environmental dynamics, our model mitigates scene overfitting and facilitates modeling of robot-environment interactions. To achieve closed-loop control, we construct an autoregressive video prediction model integrated with high-frequency robot kinematic control, enabling interaction with both robot policies and human teleoperators. In our experiments, even when trained solely on limited fixed-scene data, our model achieves superior in-domain performance and robust zero-shot generalization to highly randomized, unseen environments. For downstream applications, GeniWorld serves as a scalable policy evaluator that remains reliable under environmental perturbations. Furthermore, even with limited real-world demonstrations, GeniWorld generates diverse manipulation trajectories within the world model, improving downstream policy performance and robustness in complex environments.

Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in task-irrelevant components such as background distractors or lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a visual model-based RL method that learns a latent representation resilient to such spurious variations. Our training objective encourages the representation to be maximally predictive of dynamics and reward, while constraining the information flow from the observation to the latent representation. We demonstrate that this objective significantly bolsters the resilience of visual model-based RL methods to visual distractors, allowing them to operate in dynamic environments. We then show that while the learned encoder is resilient to spirious variations, it is not invariant under significant distribution shift. To address this, we propose a simple reward-free alignment procedure that enables test time adaptation of the encoder. This allows for quick adaptation to widely differing environments without having to relearn the dynamics and policy. Our effort is a step towards making model-based RL a practical and useful tool for dynamic, diverse domains. We show its effectiveness in simulation benchmarks with significant spurious variations as well as a real-world egocentric navigation task with noisy TVs in the background. Videos and code at https://zchuning.github.io/repo-website/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model can process instructions and visual perception to directly generate actions as output in an end-to-end fashion due to its strong multi-modal reasoning capabilities. While the performance of VLA models is promising, their computational cost can be substantial. This raises challenge for applying them on robotics tasks, which requires real-time decision-making to respond quickly to environmental changes. Since robotic control involves sequential decision-making, the visual input often exhibits minimal variation between successive steps. A natural idea is to reuse the computational results of unchanged visual tokens from the last step. Motivated by this idea, we propose VLA-Cache, an efficient vision-language-action model. VLA-Cache incorporates a token-selection mechanism that compares the visual input at each step with the input from the previous step, adaptively identifying visual tokens with minimal changes. The computational results for these unchanged tokens are then reused in subsequent steps via KV-cache, thereby significantly improving the efficiency of the VLA-Cache model. Experimental results on both simulation (e.g., LIBERO benchmark and SIMPLER) and real-world robot valid VLA-Cache can achieve practical acceleration with minimal sacrifice in success rate.

Scaling action-controllable world models is limited by the scarcity of action labels. While latent action learning promises to extract control interfaces from unlabeled video, learned latents often fail to transfer across contexts: they entangle scene-specific cues and lack a shared coordinate system. This occurs because standard objectives operate only within each clip, providing no mechanism to align action semantics across contexts. Our key insight is that although actions are unobserved, their semantic effects are observable and can serve as a shared reference. We introduce SeqΔ-REPA, a sequence-level control-effect alignment objective that anchors integrated latent action to temporal feature differences from a frozen, self-supervised video encoder. Building on this, we present Olaf-World, a pipeline that pretrains action-conditioned video world models from large-scale passive video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method learns a more structured latent action space, leading to stronger zero-shot action transfer and more data-efficient adaptation to new control interfaces than state-of-the-art baselines.

Recent advances in diffusion transformers have empowered video generation models to generate high-quality video clips from texts or images. However, world models with the ability to predict long-horizon futures from past observations and actions remain underexplored, especially for general-purpose scenarios and various forms of actions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Astra, an interactive general world model that generates real-world futures for diverse scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving, robot grasping) with precise action interactions (e.g., camera motion, robot action). We propose an autoregressive denoising architecture and use temporal causal attention to aggregate past observations and support streaming outputs. We use a noise-augmented history memory to avoid over-reliance on past frames to balance responsiveness with temporal coherence. For precise action control, we introduce an action-aware adapter that directly injects action signals into the denoising process. We further develop a mixture of action experts that dynamically route heterogeneous action modalities, enhancing versatility across diverse real-world tasks such as exploration, manipulation, and camera control. Astra achieves interactive, consistent, and general long-term video prediction and supports various forms of interactions. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the improvements of Astra in fidelity, long-range prediction, and action alignment over existing state-of-the-art world models.

We present a method to generate video-action pairs that follow text instructions, starting from an initial image observation and the robot's joint states. Our approach automatically provides action labels for video diffusion models, overcoming the common lack of action annotations and enabling their full use for robotic policy learning. Existing methods either adopt two-stage pipelines, which limit tightly coupled cross-modal information sharing, or rely on adapting a single-modal diffusion model for a joint distribution that cannot fully leverage pretrained video knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we (1) extend a pretrained video diffusion model with a parallel, dedicated action diffusion model that preserves pretrained knowledge, (2) introduce a Bridge Attention mechanism to enable effective cross-modal interaction, and (3) design an action refinement module to convert coarse actions into precise controls for low-resolution datasets. Extensive evaluations on multiple public benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method generates higher-quality videos, more accurate actions, and significantly outperforms existing baselines, offering a scalable framework for leveraging large-scale video data for robotic learning.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models acquire broad embodied capabilities through large-scale pretraining, yet their generalization remains far more fragile than that of LLMs and VLMs. The prevailing remedy, post-training via supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, improves task-specific performance but narrows the generalist capability that makes pretraining valuable. We identify a key bottleneck: VLA failures stem not only from action generation but also from action evaluation. A diagnostic pass@k study confirms that frozen VLAs already contain competent behaviors in their output distribution, with overall success rates rising from 33% at pass@1 to 92% at pass@32. Inspired by this, we propose SVA (Search, Value, and Act), a simple framework that equips frozen VLA policies with long-term consequence awareness. SVA first uses Monte-Carlo tree search in simulation to fully explore the VLA's output distribution and collect diverse trajectories annotated with empirical returns; this knowledge is then distilled into a lightweight Q-value model that predicts the expected consequence of candidate actions; at deployment, the frozen VLA proposes multiple candidates and the evaluator selects the one with the highest uncertainty-regularized Q-value, requiring no simulator access. By decoupling action proposal from consequence evaluation, SVA preserves the generalization capacity of the VLA backbone while substantially improving task success rates. Experiments across embodied benchmarks show that SVA consistently improves generalization on unseen tasks and exhibits strong test-time scaling behavior. Strikingly, SVA enables a 9B VLA to outperform a 27B VLA by 7 points at 27% lower inference latency, suggesting that scaling test-time evaluation is more cost-effective than scaling model size.

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

Most imitation learning methods assume full observability in table-top settings. In practice, objects are often occluded, requiring robots to both search and act, and learning this coupled behavior from limited demonstrations remains challenging. We propose See2Act, an imitation learning approach that conditions action prediction on a sequence of actively-inferred viewpoints at test time, by coupling action denoising with viewpoint refinement. The policy is trained using camera poses anchored to keyframe actions from offline demonstrations, enabling implicit learning of where to see, while learning how to act. We empirically demonstrate that in Ravens the policy recovers informative viewpoints under severe occlusions, and on RLBench tasks it improves performance by up to 34% over prior methods. In the real world, we collect 50 demonstrations in a digital twin and achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on pick-and-place tasks using depth observations. The policy handles significant occlusions, showing that learned viewpoint reasoning enables robust manipulation under partial observability.

World action models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising direction for robot policy learning, as they can leverage powerful video backbones to model the future states. However, existing approaches often rely on separate action modules, or use action representations that are not pixel-grounded, making it difficult to fully exploit the pretrained knowledge of video models and limiting transfer across viewpoints and environments. In this work, we present Action Images, a unified world action model that formulates policy learning as multiview video generation. Instead of encoding control as low-dimensional tokens, we translate 7-DoF robot actions into interpretable action images: multi-view action videos that are grounded in 2D pixels and explicitly track robot-arm motion. This pixel-grounded action representation allows the video backbone itself to act as a zero-shot policy, without a separate policy head or action module. Beyond control, the same unified model supports video-action joint generation, action-conditioned video generation, and action labeling under a shared representation. On RLBench and real-world evaluations, our model achieves the strongest zero-shot success rates and improves video-action joint generation quality over prior video-space world models, suggesting that interpretable action images are a promising route to policy learning.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for open-world robot manipulation, but their practical deployment is often constrained by cost: billion-scale VLM backbones and iterative diffusion/flow-based action heads incur high latency and compute, making real-time control expensive on commodity hardware. We present A1, a fully open-source and transparent VLA framework designed for low-cost, high-throughput inference without sacrificing manipulation success; Our approach leverages pretrained VLMs that provide implicit affordance priors for action generation. We release the full training stack (training code, data/data-processing pipeline, intermediate checkpoints, and evaluation scripts) to enable end-to-end reproducibility. Beyond optimizing the VLM alone, A1 targets the full inference pipeline by introducing a budget-aware adaptive inference scheme that jointly accelerates the backbone and the action head. Specifically, we monitor action consistency across intermediate VLM layers to trigger early termination, and propose Inter-Layer Truncated Flow Matching that warm-starts denoising across layers, enabling accurate actions with substantially fewer effective denoising iterations. Across simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, VLABench) and real robots (Franka, AgiBot), A1 achieves state-of-the-art success rates while significantly reducing inference cost (e.g., up to 72% lower per-episode latency for flow-matching inference and up to 76.6% backbone computation reduction with minor performance degradation). On RoboChallenge, A1 achieves an average success rate of 29.00%, outperforming baselines including pi0(28.33%), X-VLA (21.33%), and RDT-1B (15.00%).

Reinforcement learning for agentic multimodal models often suffers from interaction collapse, where models learn to reduce tool usage and multi-turn reasoning, limiting the benefits of agentic behavior. We introduce PyVision-RL, a reinforcement learning framework for open-weight multimodal models that stabilizes training and sustains interaction. Our approach combines an oversampling-filtering-ranking rollout strategy with an accumulative tool reward to prevent collapse and encourage multi-turn tool use. Using a unified training pipeline, we develop PyVision-Image and PyVision-Video for image and video understanding. For video reasoning, PyVision-Video employs on-demand context construction, selectively sampling task-relevant frames during reasoning to significantly reduce visual token usage. Experiments show strong performance and improved efficiency, demonstrating that sustained interaction and on-demand visual processing are critical for scalable multimodal agents.

World models aim to understand, remember, and predict dynamic visual environments, yet a unified benchmark for evaluating their fundamental abilities remains lacking. To address this gap, we introduce MIND, the first open-domain closed-loop revisited benchmark for evaluating Memory consIstency and action coNtrol in worlD models. MIND contains 250 high-quality videos at 1080p and 24 FPS, including 100 (first-person) + 100 (third-person) video clips under a shared action space and 25 + 25 clips across varied action spaces covering eight diverse scenes. We design an efficient evaluation framework to measure two core abilities: memory consistency and action control, capturing temporal stability and contextual coherence across viewpoints. Furthermore, we design various action spaces, including different character movement speeds and camera rotation angles, to evaluate the action generalization capability across different action spaces under shared scenes. To facilitate future performance benchmarking on MIND, we introduce MIND-World, a novel interactive Video-to-World baseline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the completeness of MIND and reveal key challenges in current world models, including the difficulty of maintaining long-term memory consistency and generalizing across action spaces. Project page: https://csu-jpg.github.io/MIND.github.io/

Recent advances in robot manipulation have leveraged pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) and explored integrating 3D spatial signals into these models for effective action prediction, giving rise to the promising vision-language-action (VLA) paradigm. However, most existing approaches overlook the importance of active perception: they typically rely on static, wrist-mounted cameras that provide an end-effector-centric viewpoint. As a result, these models are unable to adaptively select optimal viewpoints or resolutions during task execution, which significantly limits their performance in long-horizon tasks and fine-grained manipulation scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose ActiveVLA, a novel vision-language-action framework that empowers robots with active perception capabilities for high-precision, fine-grained manipulation. ActiveVLA adopts a coarse-to-fine paradigm, dividing the process into two stages: (1) Critical region localization. ActiveVLA projects 3D inputs onto multi-view 2D projections, identifies critical 3D regions, and supports dynamic spatial awareness. (2) Active perception optimization. Drawing on the localized critical regions, ActiveVLA uses an active view selection strategy to choose optimal viewpoints. These viewpoints aim to maximize amodal relevance and diversity while minimizing occlusions. Additionally, ActiveVLA applies a 3D zoom-in to improve resolution in key areas. Together, these steps enable finer-grained active perception for precise manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ActiveVLA achieves precise 3D manipulation and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three simulation benchmarks. Moreover, ActiveVLA transfers seamlessly to real-world scenarios, enabling robots to learn high-precision tasks in complex environments.

Generalizing to long-horizon manipulation tasks in a zero-shot setting remains a central challenge in robotics. Current multimodal foundation based approaches, despite their capabilities, typically fail to decompose high-level commands into executable action sequences from static visual input alone. To address this challenge, we introduce Super-Mimic, a hierarchical framework that enables zero-shot robotic imitation by directly inferring procedural intent from unscripted human demonstration videos. Our framework is composed of two sequential modules. First, a Human Intent Translator (HIT) parses the input video using multimodal reasoning to produce a sequence of language-grounded subtasks. These subtasks then condition a Future Dynamics Predictor (FDP), which employs a generative model that synthesizes a physically plausible video rollout for each step. The resulting visual trajectories are dynamics-aware, explicitly modeling crucial object interactions and contact points to guide the low-level controller. We validate this approach through extensive experiments on a suite of long-horizon manipulation tasks, where Super-Mimic significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by over 20%. These results establish that coupling video-driven intent parsing with prospective dynamics modeling is a highly effective strategy for developing general-purpose robotic systems.

Visual imitation learning frameworks allow robots to learn manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. While existing approaches mainly focus on policy design, they often neglect the structure and capacity of visual encoders, limiting spatial understanding and generalization. Inspired by biological vision systems, which rely on both visual and proprioceptive cues for robust control, we propose VGGT-DP, a visuomotor policy framework that integrates geometric priors from a pretrained 3D perception model with proprioceptive feedback. We adopt the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) as the visual encoder and introduce a proprioception-guided visual learning strategy to align perception with internal robot states, improving spatial grounding and closed-loop control. To reduce inference latency, we design a frame-wise token reuse mechanism that compacts multi-view tokens into an efficient spatial representation. We further apply random token pruning to enhance policy robustness and reduce overfitting. Experiments on challenging MetaWorld tasks show that VGGT-DP significantly outperforms strong baselines such as DP and DP3, particularly in precision-critical and long-horizon scenarios.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to provide a single generalist controller for robots, but today's systems fall short on the criteria that matter for real-world deployment. Frontier models are closed, open-weight alternatives are tied to expensive hardware, reasoning-augmented policies pay prohibitive latency for their grounding, and fine-tuned success rates remain below the threshold for dependable use. We present MolmoAct2, a fully open action reasoning model built for practical deployment, advancing its predecessor along five axes. We introduce MolmoER, a VLM backbone specialized for spatial and embodied reasoning, trained on a 3.3M-sample corpus with a specialize-then-rehearse recipe. We release three new datasets spanning low-to-medium cost platforms, including MolmoAct2-BimanualYAM, 720 hours of teleoperated bimanual trajectories that constitute the largest open bimanual dataset to date, together with quality-filtered Franka (DROID) and SO100/101 subsets. We provide OpenFAST, an open-weight, open-data action tokenizer trained on millions of trajectories across five embodiments. We redesign the architecture to graft a flow-matching continuous-action expert onto a discrete-token VLM via per-layer KV-cache conditioning. Finally, we propose MolmoThink, an adaptive-depth reasoning variant that re-predicts depth tokens only for scene regions that change between timesteps, retaining geometric grounding at a fraction of prior latency. In the most extensive empirical study of any open VLA to date, spanning 7 simulation and real-world benchmarks, MolmoAct2 outperforms strong baselines including Pi-05, while MolmoER surpasses GPT-5 and Gemini Robotics ER-1.5 across 13 embodied-reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training code, and complete training data. Project page: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact2

Although Vision-Language Models (VLM) have demonstrated impressive planning and reasoning capabilities, translating these abilities into the physical world introduces significant challenges. Conventional Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate reasoning and action into a monolithic architecture, generalize poorly because they are constrained by scarce, narrow-domain data. While recent dual-system approaches attempt to decouple "thinking" from "acting", they are often constrained by semantic ambiguities within the action module. This ambiguity makes large-scale, cross-task training infeasible. Consequently, these systems typically necessitate fine-tuning on newly collected data when deployed to novel environments, and the cooperation mechanism between the two systems remains ill-defined. To address these limitations, we introduce, for the first time, a framework centered around a generalizable action expert. Our approach utilizes sparse 3D trajectories as an intermediate representation, effectively bridging the high-level planning capabilities of the VLM with the low-level physical action module. During the planning phase, the VLM is only required to generate coarse 3D waypoints. These waypoints are then processed by our generalizable action expert, which refines them into dense, executable action sequences by sampling real-time point cloud observations of the environment. To promote training efficiency and robust generalization, we introduce a novel "Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning" paradigm. Our method combines the broad generalization capabilities of VLMs in visual understanding and planning with the fine-grained, action-level generalization of action expert.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models built on pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) require extensive post-training, resulting in high computational overhead that limits scalability and deployment.We propose CogVLA, a Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages instruction-driven routing and sparsification to improve both efficiency and performance. CogVLA draws inspiration from human multimodal coordination and introduces a 3-stage progressive architecture. 1) Encoder-FiLM based Aggregation Routing (EFA-Routing) injects instruction information into the vision encoder to selectively aggregate and compress dual-stream visual tokens, forming a instruction-aware latent representation. 2) Building upon this compact visual encoding, LLM-FiLM based Pruning Routing (LFP-Routing) introduces action intent into the language model by pruning instruction-irrelevant visually grounded tokens, thereby achieving token-level sparsity. 3) To ensure that compressed perception inputs can still support accurate and coherent action generation, we introduce V-L-A Coupled Attention (CAtten), which combines causal vision-language attention with bidirectional action parallel decoding. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that CogVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance with success rates of 97.4% and 70.0%, respectively, while reducing training costs by 2.5-fold and decreasing inference latency by 2.8-fold compared to OpenVLA. CogVLA is open-sourced and publicly available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/CogVLA.

Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, most existing approaches rely on large collections of robot demonstrations, which are costly to obtain and tightly coupled to specific embodiments. Human videos, by contrast, are abundant and capture rich interactions, providing diverse semantic and physical cues for real-world manipulation. Yet, embodiment differences and the frequent absence of task-aligned annotations make their direct use in VLA models challenging. This survey provides a unified view of how human videos are transformed into effective knowledge for VLA models. We categorize existing approaches into four classes based on the action-related information they derive: (i) latent action representations that encode inter-frame changes; (ii) predictive world models that forecast future frames; (iii) explicit 2D supervision that extracts image-plane cues; and (iv) explicit 3D reconstruction that recovers geometry or motion. Beyond this taxonomy, we highlight three key open challenges in this area: structuring unstructured videos into training-ready episodes, grounding video-derived supervision into robot-executable actions under embodiment and viewpoint heterogeneity, and designing evaluation protocols that better predict real-world deployment performance and transfer efficiency, thereby informing future research directions. A curated list of papers and resources is available at https://github.com/AaronFengZY/HumanCentricToVLA-Survey.

Diffusion-based policies have recently achieved remarkable success in robotics by formulating action prediction as a conditional denoising process. However, the standard practice of sampling from random Gaussian noise often requires multiple iterative steps to produce clean actions, leading to high inference latency that incurs a major bottleneck for real-time control. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of uninformed noise sampling and propose Action-to-Action flow matching (A2A), a novel policy paradigm that shifts from random sampling to initialization informed by the previous proprioceptive action. Unlike existing methods that treat proprioceptive action feedback as static conditions, A2A leverages historical proprioceptive sequences, embedding them into a high-dimensional latent space as the starting point for action generation. This design bypasses costly iterative denoising while effectively capturing the robot's physical dynamics and temporal continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A2A exhibits high training efficiency, fast inference speed, and improved generalization. Notably, A2A enables high-quality action generation in as few as a single inference step, and exhibits superior robustness to visual perturbations and enhanced generalization to unseen configurations. Lastly, we also extend A2A to video generation, demonstrating its broader versatility in temporal modeling. Project site: https://lorenzo-0-0.github.io/A2A_Flow_Matching.

World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scale. This work introduces Interactive VideoGPT (iVideoGPT), a scalable autoregressive transformer framework that integrates multimodal signals--visual observations, actions, and rewards--into a sequence of tokens, facilitating an interactive experience of agents via next-token prediction. iVideoGPT features a novel compressive tokenization technique that efficiently discretizes high-dimensional visual observations. Leveraging its scalable architecture, we are able to pre-train iVideoGPT on millions of human and robotic manipulation trajectories, establishing a versatile foundation that is adaptable to serve as interactive world models for a wide range of downstream tasks. These include action-conditioned video prediction, visual planning, and model-based reinforcement learning, where iVideoGPT achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work advances the development of interactive general world models, bridging the gap between generative video models and practical model-based reinforcement learning applications.