RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate Vision‑Language‑Action models on fine‑grained spatial reasoning and long‑horizon procedural planning. It contains 10 task categories, 56 base tasks, and 280 variants across five difficulty levels, with 527K trajectories collected from multiple embodiments and scenes. The benchmark introduces diagnostic metrics beyond binary success, revealing that current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise execution, and memory‑intensive planning.
By Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
The paper introduces DroneCATS-Agent, a modular framework that places a multimodal large language model (MLLM) at the core of a drone’s control loop, allowing the model to decide actions solely from prompts. It presents the DroneCATS benchmark, evaluating MLLMs on four tasks—approaching, tracking, searching, and multi‑drone commanding—without fine‑tuning or function‑calling. Results show that while small open models can navigate reliably, they often fail by mismanaging protocol termination, highlighting a gap between perception and action planning in current MLLMs.
By Jaewoo Park, Minyoung Lee, Sukmin Seo, Moonbin Yim, Hyunwook Yoon, Dohoon Ryu, Daehee Kim, Myungseo Song, Jihyuk Byun, Seunggyu Chang, Taeho Kil, Jiseob Kim, Bado Lee, Geewook Kim
arXiv:2601. 20334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift.
By Brian Y. Tsui, Alan Y. Fang, Tiffany J. Hwu
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:2608. 06756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models are increasingly serving as the reasoning core of embodied agents.
By Ying Chen, Weizhen Li, Zhe Hu, Zhenjiang Li, Rui Jiang, Zhifeng Gu, Lihuang Fang, Jiangping Liu, Lei Yi, Jie Chen
The paper introduces 2AM, a system that separates memory and action execution in long‑horizon robot manipulation. 2AM stores task memory exclusively in a multimodal Agent, while a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model performs motion based on language and optional 2D hints. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion—over 61 points higher than the best baseline—demonstrating that agent‑side memory and precise steering of the Action Model can substantially improve performance.
By Yutong Hu, Fengjiao Chen, Xuezhi Cao, Renaud Detry
arXiv:2606. 30111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules.
By Jian Zhou, Sihao Lin, Jin Li, Shuai Fu, Gengze Zhou, Qi Wu
arXiv:2606. 30111v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules.
By Jian Zhou, Sihao Lin, Jin Li, Shuai Fu, Gengze Zhou, Qi Wu
arXiv:2606. 04046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control.
By Boyuan Xiao, Bohong Chen, Yumeng Li, Ji Feng, Yao-Xiang Ding, Kun Zhou
arXiv:2607. 10350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent VLM and VLA systems have improved robotic perception and action prediction, yet long-horizon embodied agents still require a general runtime layer for reasoning, memory, tool use, verification, and cross-embodiment execution.
By Jiayi Tian, Shiao Liu, Yuting Xu, Jia Lu, Zihao Guan, Honglin Han, Di Yang, Minqi Gu, Yifei Qian, Tianlin Zhang, Yanqing Zhu, Zeqian Ye, Menglin Yang, Fei Wang, Xu Hu, Xiuxian Li, Wei Zhang, Shihui Su, Yiyan Ji, Jingbo Wang, Ziteng Feng, Jiaheng Liu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xiaolong Wu, Mingyang Yin, Zedong Chu, Mu Xu
StarVLA-α is a streamlined Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model that reduces architectural and pipeline complexity to facilitate systematic study of VLA design choices. By employing a strong VLM backbone and minimal design, it achieves competitive performance across multiple benchmarks (LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, RoboCasa) and outperforms the baseline π₀.₅ by 20% on the RoboChallenge benchmark. The authors plan to release the code to support future VLA research.
By Jinhui Ye, Ning Gao, Senqiao Yang, Jinliang Zheng, Zixuan Wang, Yuxin Chen, Pengguang Chen, Yilun Chen, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia
The paper introduces 2AM, a system that keeps task memory solely within a multimodal Agent while using a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model to execute motions. By compiling interaction history into subtask language and optional 2D grasp/place/move hints, the Agent steers the Action Model, which is trained to tolerate imperfect guidance through dropout, noise, and jitter. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion without depth, geometry, or planners, vastly outperforming the best baseline.