The paper introduces BAS‑VLA, a task‑semantic action calibration framework for vision‑language‑action models that addresses two failure modes: unnecessary action drift under appearance changes and insufficient behavioral change under semantic alterations. BAS‑VLA uses a breaking‑centered calibration core and a selective evidence‑gated preserving auxiliary to maintain performance on clean and semantics‑preserving conditions while suppressing stale‑task behavior. Experiments on OpenPI‑pi0.5 and LIBERO‑Object Milk‑Swap show high success rates on clean and preserved tasks, a dramatic drop under target‑object swaps, and improved robustness to style shifts from 42% to 70% without harming clean performance.
By Shuaijun Liu, Feiyang You, Chengyu Wu, Shuyang Hao, Chenglong Zhang, Jingyao Cai, Xingwei Chen, Ningxin Su
arXiv:2603. 06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to perform manipulation tasks directly from natural language instructions and are increasingly viewed as a foundation for generalist robotic policies.
By Ninghao Zhang, Bin Zhu, Shijie Zhou, Jingjing Chen
EmbodiedSkills is a unified framework that treats each skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites and verifying outcomes during long‑horizon vision‑language‑action tasks. It connects high‑level skill selection, bounded low‑level VLA execution, and post‑action verification through a fixed executable‑skill interface, enabling easy replacement of low‑level policies and recording of structured trajectories for supervision and adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3‑VL and OpenPI/pi0.5 on RoboTwin 2.0 and LIBERO, the framework achieves high success rates (86.20% and 97.40% respectively) and demonstrates effective memory‑dependent task performance.
By Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Tianwei Lin, Jinhao Mao, Zhenxuan Fan, Mingjian Gao, Yang Dai, Wentong Li, Zheqi Lv, Zheng Dong, Yingjie Niu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jun Xiao, Chao Li, Yueting Zhuang
Vision‑Language‑Action models (VLAs) often fail to follow language instructions because they rely on vision shortcuts learned from biased datasets. The authors introduce LIBERO‑CF, a counterfactual benchmark that tests language following by providing alternative task instructions for the same scene layouts, revealing widespread counterfactual failures. They propose Counterfactual Action Guidance (CAG), a dual‑branch inference scheme that amplifies language conditioning, which consistently improves language grounding and task success across diverse VLAs without requiring extra data or architectural changes.
By Yu Fang, Yuchun Feng, Dong Jing, Jiaqi Liu, Yue Yang, Zhenyu Wei, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding
arXiv:2608.08273v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-based embodied agents executing multi-step natural language instructions require feedback mechanisms that assess task progress over co...
By Hwanhee Kim, Jaehyun Jang, Seungmin Cha, Hyeonseo Yun, Donghoon Lee, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv:2605.30117v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Understanding how Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models transform multimodal knowledge into embodied control remains an open challenge. We present VL...
By Haoyuan Shi, Xiancong Ren, Yingji Zhang, Qinfan Zhang, Jiayu Hu, Haozhe Shan, Han Dong, Jinpeng Lu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
arXiv:2609.32292v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-and-language navigation increasingly relies on general-purpose semantic planners, yet translating correct high-level intent into relia...
By Xuekang Yang, Lu Chen, Shuang Luo, Jialing Zhu, Qi Zhang, Yue Gao, Xiang Zhang
SceneTeract is a verification interface that separates semantic action understanding from physical feasibility in indoor 3D scenes. It decomposes activities into atomic actions and performs explicit geometric checks to determine executability, providing diagnostic traces for failures. The system reveals widespread functional and accessibility issues in synthetic scenes, shows that existing VLMs over‑predict action feasibility, and improves VLM performance through post‑training with verifier feedback, with benefits that generalize to real‑world scenes.
By L\'eopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand, Boxiao Pan, Yang You, Leonidas Guibas, Maks Ovsjanikov
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.
By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
EPIC-Bench is a perception‑centric benchmark for fine‑grained embodied visual grounding in vision‑language models. It contains 6.6k human‑annotated tuples of Image, Text, and Mask across the three core stages of embodied interaction—Target Localization, Navigation, and Manipulation. The benchmark offers 23 fine‑grained tasks, multi‑dimensional settings, and evaluates over 80 leading VLMs to provide diagnostic insights into their vision‑language grounding capabilities.
By Haozhe Shan, Xiancong Ren, Han Dong, Yingji Zhang, Haoyuan Shi, Jiayu Hu, Qinfan Zhang, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Bin Shen, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu, Xiaozhu Ju
arXiv:2606. 00145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) agents can execute natural-language instructions, yet deployed systems still lack an operational interface: deciding when the instruction is complete.
By Yusuke Sano, Takeshi Itoga
arXiv:2608.29537v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policies offer broad manipulation skills but execute open-loop action chunks without tracking task progress, so t...
By Hongbo Gao, Zeyu Ni, Xin Wen, Siyu Xu, Ruifeng Li