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. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control.
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.
By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.
By Tianxiang Jiang, Sheng Xia, Yicheng Xu, Linquan Wu, Xiangyu Zeng, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao, Yi Wang
arXiv:2510. 01483v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image-level scene understanding, but reasoning over long egocentric video remains costly: because VLMs maintain no persistent memory or explicit spatial representation, all sampled frames must be re-processed for every new query.
By Mohamad Al Mdfaa, Svetlana Lukina, Timur Akhtyamov, Arthur Nigmatzyanov, Dmitrii Nalberskii, Sergey Zagoruyko, Gonzalo Ferrer
arXiv:2606. 14772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions.
By Wenhao Lu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Xiaofeng Wang, Xiaoran Zhang, Yatai Ji, Yong Zhao, Yue Hu, Yingzhen Nie, Jinlong Zhu, Zheng Zhu
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
The paper introduces VLAct, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that focuses on representation‑centric continued pre‑training rather than merely scaling robot data. VLAct is trained on diverse, multi‑embodiment robot data and preserves a broad VLM prior while encouraging shared action semantics across embodiments. Experiments across simulation, real‑world, and unseen‑embodiment settings show that VLAct consistently outperforms existing industrial VLA systems, achieving high success rates with only a modest compute budget and open‑source data.
By Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen, Zixuan Wang, Longxiang Tang, Haokun Gui, Jinhui Ye, Changsheng Lu, Xiaoyang Wu, Mingkang Zhu, Pengguang Chen, Shu Liu, Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
The paper presents VLANeXt, a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model built from a unified framework that systematically analyzes design choices across foundational components, perception essentials, and action modeling. By dissecting these dimensions, the authors identify 12 key findings that form a practical recipe for strong VLA models, and demonstrate that VLANeXt outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on LIBERO and LIBERO‑plus benchmarks while also excelling in real‑world experiments. The study further extends VLANeXt into a family of variants—scaled models, latent‑action pretraining, latent predictive representation learning, and world action modeling—showing that the core recipe remains effective across different scales and emerging paradigms.
By Xiao-Ming Wu, Kang Liao, Yihang Luo, Bin Fan, Jian-Jian Jiang, Runze Yang, Zhonghua Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Chen Change Loy
Reliable evaluation of human motion understanding is fundamental to advancing embodied AI, robotics, and animation. However, existing benchmarks suffer from coarse semantic granularity, undifferentiated difficulty, limited annotation quality, and pervasive answer ambiguity, leaving them unable to diagnose where current models fail.
arXiv:2602.18532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Following the rise of large foundation models, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) emerged, leveraging strong visual and language understand...
By Xiao-Ming Wu, Bin Fan, Kang Liao, Jian-Jian Jiang, Runze Yang, Yihang Luo, Zhonghua Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Chen Change Loy
arXiv:2508.13073v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Robotic manipulation, a key frontier in robotics and embodied AI, requires precise motor control and multimodal understanding, yet traditiona...
By Rui Shao, Wei Li, Lingsen Zhang, Renshan Zhang, Zhiyang Liu, Ran Chen, Liqiang Nie
arXiv:2609.38616v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable flexible action generation, their generalization across diverse environmental elements, including ma...
By Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Mohsen Hariri, Debargha Ganguly, Wang Yang, Kai Ye, Bryce Grant, Vipin Chaudhary, Yu Yin