arXiv AI

Unifying Policy Learning and State Prediction through Spatial Language Modeling

The paper introduces Spatial Language Modeling, a framework that unifies action generation and state prediction using a shared vocabulary of discrete coordinates and semantic tokens. An autoregressive Transformer learns both tasks through a common next‑token objective, trained first with random‑play transition pretraining and then on expert demonstrations. Experiments on the Push‑T task in simulation and on a real robot show that the model matches simulation performance and outperforms baseline policies in task success and target coverage, while also accurately predicting scene states from action trajectories.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

arXiv:2606. 17046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world.

By Jisang Han, Seonghu Jeon, Jaewoo Jung, Ren\'e Zurbr\"ugg, Honggyu An, Tifanny Portela, Marco Hutter, Marc Pollefeys, Seungryong Kim, Sunghwan Hong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

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

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

PhysBrain 1.5: From Vision-Language Models to Physical Foundation Models

PhysBrain 1.5 is a unified vision‑language model that learns to understand physical environments, generate actions, and predict future states by encoding language, end‑effector motion, and dense visual targets as discrete sequences and training them with autoregressive next‑token prediction. The model is pre‑trained on human interaction videos and fine‑tuned on human demonstrations, robot trajectories, and simulated experience, achieving an average score of 72.5 across 28 embodied understanding benchmarks and outperforming other open‑source models on 14 of them. It also demonstrates the ability to produce end‑effector trajectories and predict future scenes with spatially aligned RGB, depth, and robot‑mask outputs.

By DeepCybo Team, Yu Bin, Haipeng Cao, Zheng Chang, Kai Chen, Youning Chen, Kailin Deng, Yichao Du, Xiaotong Fu, Haoyang Ge, Yunlong Guo, Chenliu Hao, Jiyan He, Xuguo He, Yakun Hou, Kai Hu, Cong Huang, Tuopusen Huang, Yu Huang, Hong Li, Peize Li, Shijie Lian, Xiaopeng Lin, Yun Lin, Haibao Liu, Haochen Liu, Qiuzhi Liu, Shengcai Liu, Zhiqiang Liu, Tao Luo, Peng Ren, Shuo Ren, Chaoyi Ruan, Zhaolong Shen, Yukun Shi, Qiyuan Su, Yuxuan Tian, Yining Wang, Changti Wu, Hao Wu, Xueyin Xu, Ruoqi Yang, Zhaoyang Yang, Hang Yuan, Zhaoyang Zeng, Hanwen Zhang, Ruimeng Zhang, Yao Zhang, Yibo Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Zhirui Zhang, Ziyi Zhang, Zubin Zheng, Zishen Zhuang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

VLA-$\Delta$: Learning Physical State Transition for Vision-Language-Action Models

VLA‑Δ introduces a framework that explicitly learns physical state transitions for vision‑language‑action models, using changes between current and future states as learning targets. The authors build a large‑scale pretraining dataset with physical state‑transition annotations that cover task‑relevant semantics and visual motion changes, providing direct supervision for continuous action generation. The resulting model performs competitively on LIBERO and RoboTwin benchmarks and outperforms π₀.₅ in real‑robot experiments, while requiring no extra inference overhead.

By Qi Lu, Jiarun Li, Ce Zhang, Miao Pan, Yi Pan, Xu Wang, Wenqi Zhang, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

ForeAct3D: Policy-Grounded Future World Modeling for VLA Policies

ForeAct3D is a framework that grounds future world modeling in Vision‑Language‑Action policies by decoding depth, semantic segmentation, and camera pose from policy representations into current and future 3D scene states. The future queries are conditioned on the policy‑generated action chunk, and a physical‑consistency closure enforces background staticity, instance‑level rigidity, and wrist‑camera pose alignment with end‑effector kinematics. This approach eliminates the need for future prediction at inference and achieves high success rates on LIBERO and CALVIN, outperforming the base policy across all suites.

By Zhe Tao, Feiran Wang, Gaowen Liu, Ramana Rao Kompella, Yan Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Semantic-Geometric Task Representations for Bimanual Manipulation from Human Demonstrations to Robot Action Planning

arXiv:2601. 11460v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning structured task representations from human demonstrations is essential for bimanual manipulation, where action ordering, object involvement, and interaction geometry vary significantly across executions.

By Franziska Herbert, Vignesh Prasad, Han Liu, Dorothea Koert, Georgia Chalvatzaki
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

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

Dynin‑Robotics introduces an omnimodal masked‑diffusion backbone, Dynin‑Omni, that jointly represents language, visual observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. By conditioning on different spans, the same model learns action prediction, next‑observation prediction, goal‑state prediction, and trajectory‑to‑instruction reconstruction, enabling test‑time scaling through goal prediction and action‑candidate evaluation. The system, pretrained on 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X‑Embodiment datasets, achieves competitive performance on LIBERO, zero‑shot LIBERO‑Plus, and a 78.4 % success rate on a Franka Research 3 robot, while a block‑parallel implementation speeds up action decoding by up to 29.2×.

By Hoeun Lee, Jaeik Kim, Jusang Oh, Jinhyeok Kim, Geon Choi, Hyeonggeun Kim, Jaeyoung Do
arXiv AI
Sep 21

FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

FOCAL‑VLA is a framework that improves vision‑language‑action models by combining subtask‑guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling. It transfers geometric knowledge from VGGT to focus on subtask‑relevant image regions and uses Track4World features to capture future 3D evolution, guiding action generation without running these models at inference time. Experiments demonstrate that FOCAL‑VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real‑world manipulation tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Di Wen, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Kunyu Peng, Michael Beetz