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
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
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