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:2605.13119v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are effective robot action executors, but they remain limited on long-horizon tasks due to the dual burde...
By Zixing Lei, Changxing Liu, Yichen Xiong, Minhao Xiong, Yuanzhuo Ding, Zhipeng Zhang, Weixin Li, Siheng Chen
arXiv:2606. 27755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-driven robotic manipulation, but they inherit oversized language backbones from pretrained VLMs whose capacity far exceeds what is needed for short robotic instructions.
By Guoheng Sun, Kaixi Feng, Shwai He, Xiaochuan Gong, Yexiao He, Ziyao Wang, Zheyu Shen, Wanghao Ye, Ramana Rao Kompella, Gaowen Liu, Ang Li
arXiv:2607. 08974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) inherit semantic capabilities from pretrained VLMs, yet large-scale post-training on robot data and architectural modifications can reshape the backbone so extensively that it becomes difficult to isolate what the VLM contributes to control.
By Yuri Ishitoya, Jeremy Siburian, Masashi Hamaya, Kuniaki Saito, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Mai Nishimura
arXiv:2607. 04171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong multimodal understanding and spatial grounding, but their computational cost limits real-time robotic control.
By Lei Iok Tong, Qingchen Xie, Wei Huang, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Qianzhi Li, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng
arXiv:2608. 14047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART).
By Yi Ding, Yanzhao Yu, Xili Dai, Xianbiao Qi, Peiwen Sun, Xueqian Wang, Xiangyu Yue, Jianan Wang
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.
The paper "ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers" addresses the lack of design guidance for action tokenization in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models. By deriving information‑theoretic principles—maximizing temporal token overlap, reducing vocabulary redundancy, boosting multimodal mutual information, and ensuring token independence—the authors propose ActionCodec, a tokenizer that improves training efficiency and VLA performance. Experiments show that a SmolVLM2‑2.2B fine‑tuned with ActionCodec reaches a 95.5 % success rate on LIBERO, rising to 97.4 % with architectural tweaks, setting a new state‑of‑the‑art for VLA models without robotics pre‑training.
By Zibin Dong, Yicheng Liu, Shiduo Zhang, Baijun Ye, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhao, Yinchuan Li, Jianye Hao
arXiv:2606. 07383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation, but real-time deployment on edge hardware remains challenging.
By Huixi Intelligence, :, Chen Zhang, Chenyang Zhou, Guanglei Ding, Guanghui He, Haibin Gao, Jiajia Chen, Jianyong Zhang, Lianyi Yu, Ningyi Xu, Ping Xu, Qingchen Li, Yingjun Hu, Yijia Zhang, Yuxi Liu
The paper introduces a framework for Flow‑Matching Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that allows independent adjustment of backbone depth, action expert depth, and denoising steps. Lightweight Exit Transformers are added at intermediate layers to enable early exits, and a KV Cache synthesis mechanism manages skipped layers so the action expert can exit deeper than the backbone. Experiments on SmolVLA and π0.5 across LIBERO and Meta‑World show that joint tuning of these compute axes reduces latency by 79.2 % and FLOPs by 31.8 %, while improving mean success rate by 5.6 %.
By Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Matteo Matteucci, Alessandro Suglia
SmolVLA-MoE introduces a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture into Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation, replacing dense feed‑forward networks with multiple expert FFNs and a token‑level router. The framework includes a shared expert with a tunable weight to balance pre‑trained knowledge and task‑specific specialization, activating only one expert during inference to keep the parameter count low. Evaluated on the LIBERO benchmark, SmolVLA‑MoE achieves an average success rate of 84.25%, surpassing both SmolVLA and OpenVLA‑7B while maintaining comparable inference efficiency.
By Shiyang Zhang, Miao Yang, Zhengda Li, Yang Shao, Ruifang Zhai, Hui Peng, Peng Song
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