The paper explores soft prompting for few‑shot object detection with vision‑language models, showing that optimizing a small number of continuous prompt tokens—especially when placed at the cross‑modal boundary and initialized from an empty space token—can match LoRA performance while training far fewer parameters. Soft prompting also avoids catastrophic forgetting, transfers to newer models, and can be verbalized into readable prompts. The study extends these findings to manipulation tasks, indicating that VLMs already contain much of the necessary knowledge for specialized domains, and the main challenge is learning how to ask for it.
arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.
arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.
The paper introduces MIME, a task‑agnostic visual in‑context learning (vICL) dataset that removes textual shortcuts by omitting explicit rules linking demonstration images to answers, forcing models to infer the rule visually. Fine‑tuning vision‑language models on MIME boosts vICL accuracy by 8.1–18.0 points across three VLMs while preserving single‑image performance and improving multi‑image and text‑only in‑context learning. The authors also propose DTAD, a technique that randomly drops demonstration labels during training to encourage visual inference, achieving comparable accuracy with more consistent attention to demonstration images and outperforming frontier models on the TrueMICL benchmark.
EmbodiedMidtrain bridges the gap between Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) and Vision‑Language‑Action Models (VLAs) by first analyzing the distribution mismatch between their data. It introduces a lightweight proximity estimator that selects VLA‑aligned samples from a large VLM pool, creating the EmbodiedMidtrain‑1M dataset used to mid‑train VLMs before VLA fine‑tuning. Experiments on simulated and real‑world robot tasks show consistent performance gains across different VLM backbones and VLA action heads, with early training steps already benefiting from the improved initialization.
arXiv:2607. 28967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt tuning adapts vision--language models with few trainable parameters, but existing approaches trade off efficiency and adaptation: static textual prompts can overfit source classes, image-conditioned prompts add per-instance computation, and multimodal tuning modifies the visual branch.
The paper introduces the Just Action Model (JAM), a framework that decouples backbone initialization, future observation objectives, and inference machinery to unify vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) approaches. JAM employs a pretrained visual backbone, an action expert, an action loss, and a foresight loss that predicts future encodings without visual generation, discarding the prediction head after training. Experiments show JAM outperforms FastWAM and ImageWAM on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin, while reducing online training FLOPs by 73%.
arXiv:2511. 16107v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual in-context learning (VICL) solves visual tasks by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations without any model training.
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
World Action Agent (WAA) is a multi‑agent framework that lets vision‑language models (VLMs) directly pilot robots by operating within a visual action workspace. The workspace provides automatically selected contact views, editable action rehearsals, and in‑view correction to refine decisions before low‑level execution. WAA learns procedural skills from expert videos and human teaching, and its interaction traces can train smaller VLMs, achieving state‑of‑the‑art success on LIBERO‑Pro and improving out‑of‑domain performance on robosuite and Qwen3.5‑9B.
arXiv:2606. 14703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious.
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.
arXiv:2606. 30185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving vision-language models (VLMs) on visual reasoning typically requires retraining or hand-designed prompts and tools.