arXiv Computer Vision

Iron: Intent-Aligned and Retrospective Dual Learning Framework for Enhancing Generalist Virtual Agents

Iron is a new framework for training generalist virtual agents that aligns low‑level actions with high‑level intents using a stepwise cycle‑consistent reward. It also repurposes failed trajectories through a hindsight reproduction mechanism to improve learning efficiency and task diversity. Experiments show Iron‑trained agents outperform those trained with three times more data, achieving a 25.06% relative improvement on unseen web tasks and better performance on complex tasks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Decoupling Planning and Control for Instructable Agents

The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples high‑level planning from low‑latency control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them autonomously at high frequency. Experiments across seven embodied environments, including multi‑agent settings, show that this approach outperforms both controller‑only and direct VLM action‑generation methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping in different pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Cortex: A Bidirectionally Aligned Embodied Agent Framework for Long-horizon Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 05377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations.

By Jiaqi Peng, Xiqian Yu, Delin Feng, Yuqiang Yang, Wenzhe Cai, Jing Xiong, Ganlin Yang, Jinliang Zheng, Jiafei Cao, Xueyuan Wei, Jiangmiao Pang, Yuan Shen, Tai Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Decoupling Planning and Control for Instructable Agents

The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples planning and control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them at high frequency, trained via relabeling rollouts with synthetic instructions and joint optimization of behavior cloning, reward, and world‑model objectives. Across seven embodied environments—including multi‑agent settings—this approach outperforms controller‑only and direct VLM action methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning, achieving competitive results with strong baselines on most tasks.

By Zineng Tang, Kelsey R. Allen, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Ishita Dasgupta, Alane Suhr
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606. 19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation.

By Nikita Kachaev, Andrey Moskalenko, Matvey Skripkin, Nikita Kurlaev, Daria Pugacheva, Albina Burlova, Mikhail Kolosov, Denis Shepelev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Elena Tutubalina, Aleksandr I. Panov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Vlad Shakhuro
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Act with Intent: Distilling Behavior Intent for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Intention Distillation (INDI), a method that injects behavior-level intent into Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model decoders by leveraging a frozen teacher vision‑language model to interpret demonstrations. During training, the teacher processes the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and execution video, producing a multimodal intent representation that the VLA decoder uses alongside trajectory and execution features to predict actions. Experiments on SimplerEnv‑Bridge, RoboCasa Kitchen, and real‑world tasks show that INDI consistently improves success rates, especially on longer‑horizon tasks, demonstrating that explicit modeling of semantic intent benefits action decoders.

By Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han