MemBodied introduces a fixed‑size episodic memory for Vision‑Language‑Action models, comprising an associative state that tracks interactions across policy calls and an episode anchor that stores a compact representation of the initial scene. By conditioning action generation on these memory components instead of raw past observations, MemBodied reduces context bloat and inference latency. In five memory‑dependent RMBench tasks, it outperforms stateless and vanilla recurrent policies by significant margins, and achieves a 90.6% success rate on the LIBERO‑Long suite, improving over the baseline by 5.4%.
By Tej Deep Pala, Navonil Majumder, Bryce Goh, Raphael Yee, Jianfei Yang, Liming Chen, Soujanya Poria
The paper introduces Intention Distillation (INDI), a method that injects behavior-level intent into Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model decoders by leveraging a frozen teacher vision‑language model to interpret demonstrations. During training, the teacher processes the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and execution video, producing a multimodal intent representation that the VLA decoder uses alongside trajectory and execution features to predict actions. Experiments on SimplerEnv‑Bridge, RoboCasa Kitchen, and real‑world tasks show that INDI consistently improves success rates, especially on longer‑horizon tasks, demonstrating that explicit modeling of semantic intent benefits action decoders.
By Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han
arXiv:2608.25757v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large-scale vision--language--action (VLA) policies have advanced generalist robot control, yet most remain stimulus-to-action black boxes: a...
By Jin Lou, Zhiyuan Jing, Xupeng Wang, Andong Chen, Xingdong Zhu, Yuexuan Li, Yuan Xu, Zhijie Zhu, Yingwei Ji, Wenpeng Nie, Renxing Feng, Liangliang Chen, Ying Chu, Jingyi Li, Jinyan Liu, Zhiqi Song, Jingxuan Zhu, Jidong Zhang, Yufei Liu, Boyang Xing, Lei Jiang, Yan Cui, Hongming Li, Yuchen Zhu
arXiv:2603. 24576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots often observe information that determines a future action long before that action is executed.
By Xinying Guo, Chenxi Jiang, Hyun Bin Kim, Yuhang Han, Ying Sun, Yang Xiao, Jianfei Yang
arXiv:2607. 25487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models translate natural-language commands into robot action sequences, but leading systems on the LIBERO-Plus robustness benchmark use three- to seven-billion-parameter backbones whose memory demands can exceed embedded robotic budgets.
By Minhyeok Lee, Chiyoung Kim, Chanhoe Gu, Seongrok Kim, Sanghyuk Roy Choi, Donghwan Hwang, Donghun Ryu, Seokhyun Kim
Vision-language-action (VLA) models commonly adopt an LLM-centric $V \to L \to A$ pathway, where visual observations are projected into the representation space of a large language model before being decoded into robot actions. Although effective, this design incurs substantial computation and memory overhead at every policy invocation.
arXiv:2606. 26443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A robot working alongside people must reason about what they have done, in what order, and with what intent.
By Baiqi Li, Ce Zhang, Yu Fang, Yue Yang, Shangzhe Li, Mingyu Ding, Gedas Bertasius
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.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao
ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference.
whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."
By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang
arXiv:2609.22854v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action models often predict actions from only the current observation, which can leave tasks involving object occlusion or visually i...
By Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Parsa Mastouri Kashani, Connor G\"ade, Matthias Kerzel, Philipp Allgeuer, Cornelius Weber, Stefan Wermter, Jae Hee Lee
arXiv:2511. 15669v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning genuinely improve Vision Language Action (VLA) models, or does it merely add overhead?
By Cheng Yin, Yankai Lin, Wang Xu, Sikyuen Tam, Xiangrui Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhouping Yin
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can turn multimodal context into robot actions, but their action decoders are still trained largely by behavior cloning. This supervises which motor command was dem...