Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted growing interest as a scalable approach to robotic manipulation. While these models are effective action predictors, deploying them as robotic agents exposes critical gaps: no mechanism for failure recovery, inconsistent execution over long horizons, and limited robustness to shifts in observations, tasks, or embodiments.
arXiv:2512. 19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging the gap between natural language commands and autonomous execution in unstructured environments remains an open challenge for robotics.
By Jin Wang, Kim Tien Ly, Jacques Cloete, Jin Jin, Nikos Tsagarakis, Ioannis Havoutis
arXiv:2601. 20334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift.
By Brian Y. Tsui, Alan Y. Fang, Tiffany J. Hwu
arXiv:2603. 22435v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: "Code-as-Policy" considers how executable code can complement data-intensive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) methods, yet their effectiveness as autonomous controllers for embodied manipulation remains underexplored.
By Letian Fu, Justin Yu, Karim El-Refai, Ethan Kou, Haoru Xue, Huang Huang, Wenli Xiao, Guanzhi Wang, Dantong Niu, Fei-Fei Li, Guanya Shi, Jiajun Wu, Shankar Sastry, Yuke Zhu, Ken Goldberg, Linxi "Jim" Fan
RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate Vision‑Language‑Action models on fine‑grained spatial reasoning and long‑horizon procedural planning. It contains 10 task categories, 56 base tasks, and 280 variants across five difficulty levels, with 527K trajectories collected from multiple embodiments and scenes. The benchmark introduces diagnostic metrics beyond binary success, revealing that current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise execution, and memory‑intensive planning.
By Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv:2512.01946v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Robust robotic manipulation requires reliable failure detection and recovery. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise in r...
By Paul Pacaud, Ricardo Garcia, Shizhe Chen, Cordelia Schmid
arXiv:2606. 28385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning.
By Minh-Loi Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Hung Khang Nguyen, Minh Le, Doanh Le Thien, Hoang H. Tran, Dung D. Le, Vu N. Duong, Daniel Sonntag, An Thai Le, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Vien Anh Ngo, Tran Van Nhiem
EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2607. 00272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional robot programming is challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse configurations and execution failures.
By Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang
arXiv:2510. 14828v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Improving the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents is crucial for robots to complete complex human instructions in long-view manipulation tasks successfully.
By Jinrui Liu, Bingyan Nie, Boyu Li, Yaran Chen, Yuze Wang, Shunsen He, Haoran Li
arXiv:2606.18363v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through...
By Haowen Liu, Xirui Li, Shaoxiong Yao, Peng Shi, Tianyi Zhou, Jia-Bin Huang, Furong Huang, Jiayuan Mao
arXiv:2607. 11119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot manipulation is a complex task that requires visual understanding, physical reasoning, planning, and closed-loop control.
By Hengyuan Hu, Priya Sundaresan, Jensen Gao, Dorsa Sadigh