arXiv:2606.02372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equipping language agents with world models enables them to anticipate environment dynamics and evaluate candidate actions before execution. However, existing textual world models are typically fixed after training, preventing them from adapting to the on-policy state-action distributions induced by an evolving agent. Meanwhile, agent-improvement methods often rely on external rewards or verifiers, limiting their applicability in realistic inte…
arXiv:2608.25395v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent vision-language-action models offer a path toward robots with broader repertoires than conventional task-specific systems. Construction deployment, however, requires a precise inventory of worker activities and the capabilities needed to execute them. We present TARCAT, an occupation-grounded taxonomy derived from 91 O*NET tasks across seven high-employment construction occupations and 30 instructional videos of physical work. TARCAT def…
arXiv:2609.03834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs describe reality in crisp assertions, while the systems now consuming them, foundation models and autonomous agents, reason natively in probabilities. We argue that this mismatch is why the integration of language models and knowledge graphs remains a data-feeding pipeline rather than a unified reasoning architecture. We envision Semantic Bayesian World Models (SBWMs): a Web that describes the world not as a database of facts but a…
arXiv:2609.04070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bridging the gap between the discrete reasoning of Vision-Language Models and the continuous, physics-constrained nature of autonomous driving remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce LaPla, a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework featuring latent-aligned planning to seamlessly ground semantic understanding in precise motion execution. We first design an action tokenizer based on a residual vector-quantized variational…
arXiv:2609.03927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For robots to operate reliably in real-world environments, they need to perceive their surroundings, act, and reason about the consequences of those actions. Rapid progress in the domains of representation learning, VLA models, and world models has significantly enhanced the capabilities of robot learning systems, enabling robots to work in increasingly complex environments. However, these paradigms are typically developed in isolation, resulting i…
arXiv:2609.03889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich loco-manipulation requires a bridge between semantic action generation and physical interaction control. Existing Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate task-level actions from visual and linguistic observations, but cannot interpret the physical interactions induced by those actions. While the whole-body control (WBC) policy can stabilize the robot, it cannot distinguish task-relevant interaction forces from forces induced by ex…
arXiv:2609.03715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models with billions of parameters now dominate the LIBERO manipulation benchmark, but the model capacity actually required by the benchmark remains unclear. We introduce MINERVA (MINimal Efficient Robotic Vision-Action policy), a family of deliberately compact visuomotor policies designed to measure this task-specific capacity floor. A 0.54M-parameter policy achieves 95.1% average success over 2,000 rollouts on the fou…
arXiv:2609.03681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training VLA policies typically rely on supervised fine-tuning with costly expert demonstrations or reinforcement learning with expensive and potentially unstable real-world exploration. World models offer a promising alternative by evaluating candidate behaviors through imagined futures, yet effective post-training requires more than accurate prediction: imagination must be scheduled where it is useful, bounded within reliable horizons, and t…
arXiv:2609.03591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning generalist policies for robust bimanual manipulation is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high quality large scale human demonstration data. In this work, we release 1,500 hours of diverse bimanual manipulation demonstrations covering everyday household tasks, and use this comprehensive corpus to train XR-2, a powerful vision-language-action (VLA) model. Enabled by a purpose built high throughput data pipeline and a carefully designed multi …
arXiv:2609.03483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air-ground collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) pairs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a global bird's-eye view and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a local first-person view, yet the setting remains largely unexplored: existing training-free methods solve single-agent tasks but offer no collaboration mechanism, and a recent CARLA-Air evaluation found no stable cooperative behavior across five state-of-the-art VLA models; na…
arXiv:2609.03276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating robot manipulation policies is becoming increasingly important as generalist models, particularly vision-language-action (VLA) models, are deployed on physical robots. However, conventional real-world evaluation remains labor-intensive, unstable, and insufficiently informative. It requires repeated hardware trials, manual scene resets, and continuous operator monitoring, may produce different policy rankings across repeated evaluations, …
arXiv:2609.03142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies fuse multimodal sensory inputs, but training on limited and homogeneous robot demonstrations encourages spurious inter-sensor correlations rather than task-relevant signal, a failure we term modality entanglement. Under real-world occlusions and distractors, this manifests as nuisance sensitivity to corruption of uninformative sensors and single-modality insufficiency when only one informative sensor remains in…
arXiv:2608.30378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Direct vision-language-action policies generate continuous robot actions efficiently, but standard behavior cloning leaves two complementary gaps: their representations are not explicitly required to describe how the scene evolves over multiple time scales, and deployment trajectories of unequal quality are often reused without separating useful dynamics from undesirable behavior. We introduce \method, a direct world-action policy that co…
arXiv:2605.27284v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed. However, existing robot datasets usually pair trajectories with coarse goal-level language, leaving execution-critical details such as active arm, approach direction, and contact region unspecified. This limits steerable policy learning and robotic video understanding.…
arXiv:2603.12665v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant advantages in robotic manipulation. However, their reliance on vision and language often leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving visual occlusion, fine-grained manipulation, and physical contact. To address these challenges, we propose TacVLA, a fine-tuned VLA model by incorporating tactile modalities into the transformer-based policy to enhance fine-grained manipulati…
arXiv:2609.01215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most vision-language-action (VLA) models -- OpenVLA, $\pi_0$, RT-2, RDT-1B -- are monolithic: they emit raw motor commands or short action chunks without organizing behavior into reusable abstractions, so they degrade on long-horizon tasks and resist interpretation. Existing skill-discovery methods sidestep the core question of when two action sequences are behaviorally equivalent, either clustering contrastive embeddings or delegating the judgme…
arXiv:2609.00404v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot capability marketplaces, the "app store for robot skills," are emerging as the deployment vector for LLM-driven robot fleets. The default cloud-native answer to "is this package safe to install?" is centralised PKI: one certificate authority, one transparency log, one root of trust. We argue this is the wrong model for embodied robot fleets, where operators face heterogeneous regulatory regimes, air-gapped deployments, tiny operator headcou…
arXiv:2609.01596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predicts and values the contact consequences of its actions. Facet-0 unifies multimodal representation learning and reinforcement learning (RL) post-training around a joint action-wrench proposal: a causal wrench history is aligned with vision-language sema…
arXiv:2609.01404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are strong perceivers of images and video. We ask how far that reach extends into acting: dropping an MLLM directly into a drone's control loop, with its entire action space declared solely in the prompt. Recent systems approach this setting but increasingly narrow the model's decision-making. We widen it back. We introduce DroneCATS-Agent, an architecture where the MLLM is a swappable component, and DroneCA…
arXiv:2609.01281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions directly to robot actions, but long-horizon tasks require more than action prediction. An agent must coordinate perception, planning, execution, progress verification, and recovery as the physical state evolves. An action prediction or a model-generated skill decision does not, by itself, guarantee that the proposed operation is valid in the current state or that …
arXiv:2609.00908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Action chunking is a standard execution strategy in modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, but fixed execution horizons impose a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Short chunks require frequent inference and may cause oscillatory behavior, whereas long chunks can become misaligned with newly observed states. We address this limitation with an adaptive action chunking approach based on internal cross-attention dynamics in the action…
arXiv:2608.26673v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large pretrained vision-language-action models achieve strong robot-manipulation performance, while compact alternatives have largely pursued efficiency by compressing the prevailing observation-to-action paradigm. We investigate whether predictive sensorimotor modeling can make more effective use of a limited parameter budget than direct observation-to-action mapping. We present PredVLA, a language-conditioned predictive-coding policy with onl…
arXiv:2607.08283v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies such as $\pi_{0.5}$ and OpenVLA perform well on many manipulation tasks, but they are often reactive: the next action is predicted from the current observation, instruction, and proprioceptive state. This assumption breaks down in stage-dependent manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on latent task progress and previous interaction outcomes. We argue that such…
arXiv:2606.20754v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but reliable uncertainty quantification remains challenging, particularly under distribution shift. Unlike autoregressive policies, many modern VLA models generate continuous actions through regression or flow-based generation, where explicit predictive probabilities are unavailable. Moreover, stochastic action sampling primarily captures action-generatio…
arXiv:2605.14712v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot imitation data are often multimodal: similar visual-language observations may be followed by different action chunks because human demonstrators act with different short-horizon intents, task phases, or recent context. Existing frame-conditioned VLA policies infer each chunk from the current observation and instruction alone, so under partial observability they may resample different intents across adjacent replanning steps, leading to in…
arXiv:2508.13073v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic manipulation, a key frontier in robotics and embodied AI, requires precise motor control and multimodal understanding, yet traditional rule-based methods fail to scale or generalize in unstructured, novel environments. In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, built upon Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) pretrained on vast image-text datasets, have emerged as a transformative paradigm. This survey provides the first system…
arXiv:2608.30983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quality-diversity (QD) algorithms have been gaining traction in robot learning, where diverse motion primitive libraries allow robots to adapt zero-shot to constraints at deployment time. However, such methods typically require expert designers to write the success condition, fitness and diversity metrics, and this strongly limits the robot's autonomy. On the other hand, existing LLM-based reward-shaping techniques allow robots to learn autonomousl…
arXiv:2608.30935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied navigation requires agents to translate heterogeneous goals and visual observations into actions across tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. Modern vision-language models (VLMs) already encode spatial priors for visual grounding, spatial reasoning, and pointing, but these capabilities are rarely elicited directly for robot control. Existing navigation systems instead rely on task- or embodiment-specific components, fragmenting perce…
arXiv:2608.30643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language-action (VLA) methods improve manipulation performance by aligning their representations with 3D scene geometry. However, these methods often struggle with long-horizon manipulation and observation aliasing between visually similar states due to a lack of temporal information: the 3D scene geometry captures only the current state, rather than how it has evolved over time. To resolve this, we present Temporal Forcing, a 4D repr…
arXiv:2608.30536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable execution of long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks remains challenging because overall task success depends on the successful completion of multiple constituent skills. Existing benchmarks, however, still rely primarily on full-task rollouts and aggregate task-level metrics, making intermediate failures difficult to observe and analyze. We present Behavior-Skill, a benchmark that reformulates the learning and evaluation of long-horizon ta…