The paper argues that current embodied vision‑language planning benchmarks favor linguistic next‑token prediction over physically grounded next‑state reasoning, leading models to rely on language priors rather than true causal dependencies. To address this, the authors introduce Causal‑Plan‑Bench, a diagnostic suite covering four causal dimensions, and Causal‑Plan‑1M, a million‑scale corpus of explicit causal reasoning traces extracted from egocentric videos. Extensive experiments show that existing models perform poorly on these tasks, while a new model trained with a tailored recipe—Causal Planner based on Qwen3‑VL‑8B—achieves significant gains, demonstrating the feasibility of physically grounded causal reasoning.
By Zheng Lu, Mingqi Gao, Qinlei Xie, Wanqi Zhong, Hanwen Cui, Zirui Song, Lijie Wang, Chong Luo, Bei Liu, Yiming Li
arXiv:2603. 09731v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint.
By Chengjun Yu, Xuhan Zhu, Chaoqun Du, Pengfei Yu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv:2609.23184v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Embodied world models learn to predict future physical dynamics from visual observations and control signals, where physical knowledge is implicitly en...
By Ziming Xu, Shuang Liang, Ruobing Han, Ziqiao Xi, Mingxing Rao, Kun Zhou, Zijun Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Yufan Wei, Junbo Huang, Yifei Shao, Fang Nan, Biwei Huang
arXiv:2609.25187v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems...
By Howard Lu, Shalfun Li, Porter Pan, Cris, Lumen, Cyril, Eric Hu, Lily Li, Maeve Zhang, Rain Sun, Robert Wang, KZ Zheng, Viggo Chen, Tim Ding, Regsis Cheng, YJ Xiao, Kian, Hai Lin, Alan Song, Elise Ma, Gody Li, Victor Yao, Yohann Tang, Ingrid Yu, Jason He, James Wang, Ryan Yu, Ping Yang, Chris Pan, Vincent Chen, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv:2609.21675v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigms remain confined to the natural...
By Wan Xu, Yuanfan Guo, Kevin Han, LaLa Chen, Wangmeng Zuo
arXiv:2606. 15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning.
By Yaoting Huang, Yifu Yuan, Linqi Han, Chengwen Li, Shuoheng Zhang, Xianze Yao, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
arXiv:2607. 04681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models.
By Matthew Foutter, Matteo Cercola, Lena Wild, Yunshan Wang, Michelle Li, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone
arXiv:2606. 23938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving VLA models incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning are attractive because they leverage pretrained VLM representations and expose intermediate decisions in natural language, yet current rationales often lack the step-by-step decision semantics needed to keep the rationale causally connected to the planned motion.
By Xiangbo Gao, Xiukun Huang, Boyu Lu, Junge Zhang, Mengjie Mao, Jiachen Li, Wei Xiong, Zhengzhong Tu
arXiv:2603. 22281v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in latent world models (e.
By Haichao Zhang, Yijiang Li, Shwai He, Tushar Nagarajan, Mingfei Chen, Jianglin Lu, Ang Li, Yun Fu
arXiv:2512. 24125v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
By Yi Liu, Sukai Wang, Dafeng Wei, Xiaowei Cai, Linqing Zhong, Jiange Yang, Guanghui Ren, Jinyu Zhang, Maoqing Yao, Chuankang Li, Xindong He, Liliang Chen, Jianlan Luo
arXiv:2508. 08983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans can learn a new manipulation task from one or two demonstrations and then perform it in a new room, with new objects, under new constraints.
By Ben Zandonati, Tom\'as Lozano-P\'erez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
By Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao