Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.5% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms \pi_ 0.5 , a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. We also introduce the adaptive temporal ensemble (ATE) strategy to balance computational efficiency and motion stability during inference, yielding the Mantis-ATE variant, which reduces inference counts by 45% while maintaining performance. We have released the code and model weights to the open-source community, which are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DENG-Lab/Mantis.
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HandVQA: Diagnosing and Improving Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning about Hands in Vision-Language Models
PDF ↗Understanding the fine-grained articulation of human hands is critical in high-stakes settings such as robot-assisted surgery, chip manufacturing, and AR/VR-based human-AI interaction. Despite achieving near-human performance on general vision-language benchmarks, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, especially in interpreting complex, articulated hand poses. We introduce HandVQA, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' understanding of detailed hand anatomy through visual question answering. Built upon high-quality 3D hand datasets (FreiHAND, InterHand2.6M, FPHA), our benchmark includes over 1.6M controlled multiple-choice questions that probe spatial relationships between hand joints, such as angles, distances, and relative positions. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs (LLaVA, DeepSeek and Qwen-VL) in both base and fine-tuned settings, using lightweight fine-tuning via LoRA. Our findings reveal systematic limitations in current models, including hallucinated finger parts, incorrect geometric interpretations, and poor generalization. HandVQA not only exposes these critical reasoning gaps but provides a validated path to improvement. We demonstrate that the 3D-grounded spatial knowledge learned from our benchmark transfers in a zero-shot setting, significantly improving accuracy of model on novel downstream tasks like hand gesture recognition (+10.33%) and hand-object interaction (+2.63%).
Efficient view planning is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotic perception, critical for tasks ranging from search and rescue operations to autonomous navigation. While classical approaches, including sampling-based and deterministic methods, have shown promise in planning camera viewpoints for scene exploration, they often struggle with computational scalability and solution optimality in complex settings. This study introduces HQC-NBV, a hybrid quantum-classical framework for view planning that leverages quantum properties to efficiently explore the parameter space while maintaining robustness and scalability. We propose a specific Hamiltonian formulation with multi-component cost terms and a parameter-centric variational ansatz with bidirectional alternating entanglement patterns that capture the hierarchical dependencies between viewpoint parameters. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that quantum-specific components provide measurable performance advantages. Compared to the classical methods, our approach achieves 7.9-49.2% higher exploration efficiency across diverse environments. Our analysis of entanglement architecture and coherence-preserving terms provides insights into the mechanisms of quantum advantage in robotic exploration tasks. This work represents a significant advancement in integrating quantum computing into robotic perception systems, offering a paradigm-shifting solution for various robot vision tasks.
Synthesizing realistic human motion from natural language holds transformative potential for animation, robotics, and virtual reality. Recent methods handle single-action sequences and simple textual instructions, yet multi-action compositions and precise editing remain elusive due to limited data diversity, inadequate representations, and fragmented pipelines. Critically, most existing methods train motion generation models from scratch, failing to exploithe rich action semantics and long-horizon reasoning already encoded in pretrained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Here we show that finetuning a pretrained MLLM with large-scale motion data yields strong zero-shot generalization across diverse text-guided motion generation and editing tasks. We present MotionMaster, a unified framework built on three components: MotionGB, a 10,000-hour dataset expanded from 400 hours of verified motion capture via spatial-temporal augmentation; an FSQ-based tokenizer that preserves both local joint accuracy and global trajectory coherence; and a finetuned MLLM with motion and language tokens in a shared embedding space. MotionMaster outperforms prior methods by 41.6% in multi-action semantic consistency and 20.8% in body-part composition. These results demonstrate that pretraining knowledge from MLLMs transfers effectively to motion understanding, opening a viable path toward general-purpose motion intelligence.
Visual SLAM is one of the most fundamental problems in computer vision, with direct applications to real-time localization tasks such as AR/VR, robotics, and 3D scene reconstruction. Although significant progress has been made in both sparse and dense approaches, real-time monocular SLAM remains challenging--particularly in the uncalibrated setting, where existing methods are often inefficient and lack modularity. In this paper, we present a new visual SLAM pipeline, called SLAM-MER, which is implemented from scratch in C++ explicitly leveraging the spatio-temporal structure of the SLAM problem for improved localization, and has modular design to easily integrate off-the-shelf components. We introduce a temporal representation based on a buffer of recent keyframes that preserves short-term scene continuity. We complement this by incorporating a spatial representation based on a 3D cell-based scene model, enabling efficient retrieval of relevant 3D points from previously reconstructed regions. Leveraging recent feed-forward geometry estimators, our hybrid design combines sparse keypoint-based localization with a semi-dense anchor-point-driven spatial representation. This integration allows us to achieve real-time performance (exceeding 80 FPS) and a substantial efficiency improvement compared to existing uncalibrated monocular SLAM pipelines, while maintaining or improving localization accuracy.
Human behaviors in the real world naturally encode rich, long-term contextual information that can be leveraged to train embodied agents for perception, understanding, and acting.However, existing capture systems typically rely on costly studio setups and wearable devices, limiting the large-scale collection of scene-conditioned human motion data in the wild.To address this, we propose EmbodMocap, a portable and affordable data collection pipeline using two moving iPhones. Our key idea is to jointly calibrate dual RGB-D sequences to reconstruct both humans and scenes within a unified metric world coordinate frame.The proposed method allows metric-scale and scene-consistent capture in everyday environments without static cameras or markers, bridging human motion and scene geometry seamlessly.Based on the collected data, we empower three embodied AI tasks: monocular human-scene-reconstruction, where we fine-tune on feedforward models that output metric-scale, world-space aligned humans and scenes; physics-based character animation, where we prove our data could be used to scale human-object interaction skills and scene-aware motion tracking; and robot motion control, where we train a humanoid robot via sim-to-real RL to replicate human motions depicted in videos. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pipeline and its contributions towards advancing embodied AI research.
Novel-view synthesis plays a crucial role in computer vision with applications in 3D reconstruction, mixed reality, and robotics. Recent approaches, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have emerged as state-of-the-art solutions, offering high-quality novel view synthesis in real time. However, training 3DGS models remains slow, particularly for high-resolution images, often requiring hours to fit a scene with 200 views. In this work, we aim to accelerate the fitting process by reducing computational overhead and improving learning efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a dilated rendering technique that renders only a subset of pixels instead of the full image, significantly reducing computational costs. To enhance learning efficiency, we develop a convergence-aware budget control mechanism that balances the addition of new Gaussians with the optimization of existing ones. Additionally, to improve densification efficiency and prevent gradient vanishing, we incorporate both positional and appearance error to enhance densification effectiveness. With these improvements, we achieve fast 4K-resolution fitting while maintaining, or even improving, novel view rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significantly faster optimization than existing approaches while preserving high rendering fidelity.
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and social robots. Recently, language model (LM)-based trajectory prediction has offered both prediction accuracy and interpretability. However, the L2 loss commonly used in trajectory prediction cannot be directly applied to LM optimization, resulting in degraded prediction performance. Moreover, current LM-based trajectory prediction methods lack explicit expressions of social interactions, and their scene descriptions are overly simplistic, making it challenging to impose practical scene constraints. To address these issues, we propose Write-to-Walk (W2W). First, we convert observed trajectories and interaction cues (companion/following/obstacle) into parsable textual prompts, so that interaction semantics are expressed more explicitly in the model input. Afterward, a T5-Small backbone is trained in a two-stage manner: (1) Full-parameter supervised fine-tuning with cross-entropy loss for language learning, enabling formatted question answering; (2) Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize W2W, where a reward function combining ADE error and off-road penalties strengthens scene constraints, producing future trajectories consistent with the scene context and further improving prediction accuracy. Experiments on benchmark datasets (ETH/UCY and SDD) demonstrate that W2W remains competitive with recent LM-based prediction methods and strong trajectory prediction baselines on ADE/FDE. The interpretability of LMs further supports W2W's deployment in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving.
Reliable incremental estimation of camera poses and 3D reconstruction is key to enable various applications including robotics, interactive visualization, and augmented reality. However, online SLAM is particularly challenging in dynamic natural environments, where scene dynamics can severely deteriorate camera pose estimation accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel monocular visual SLAM system that can robustly estimate camera poses in dynamic scenes. We leverage the complementary strengths of geometric patch-based online bundle adjustment and recent feed-forward reconstruction models. Specifically, we propose a feed-forward reconstruction model to precisely filter out dynamic regions, while also utilizing its depth prediction to enhance the robustness of the patch-based visual SLAM. By aligning depth prediction with estimated patches from bundle adjustment, we handle the inherent scale ambiguities of the batch-wise application of the feed-forward reconstruction model. Extensive experiments on multiple tasks show the superior performance of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
The rise of generalist robotic policies has created an exponential demand for large-scale training data. However, on-robot data collection is labor-intensive and often limited to specific environments. In contrast, open-world images capture a vast diversity of real-world scenes that naturally align with robotic manipulation tasks, offering a promising avenue for low-cost, large-scale robot data acquisition. Despite this potential, the lack of associated robot actions hinders the practical use of open-world images for robot learning, leaving this rich visual resource largely unexploited. To bridge this gap, we propose IGen, a framework that scalably generates realistic visual observations and executable actions from open-world images. IGen first converts unstructured 2D pixels into structured 3D scene representations suitable for scene understanding and manipulation. It then leverages the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models to transform scene-specific task instructions into high-level plans and generate low-level actions as SE(3) end-effector pose sequences. From these poses, it synthesizes dynamic scene evolution and renders temporally coherent visual observations. Experiments validate the high quality of visuomotor data generated by IGen, and show that policies trained solely on IGen-synthesized data achieve performance comparable to those trained on real-world data. This highlights the potential of IGen to support scalable data generation from open-world images for generalist robotic policy training. Code for IGen will be made publicly available.
HiF-VLA: Hindsight, Insight and Foresight through Motion Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models
PDF ↗Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. From this perspective, HiF-VLA equips a motion-centric world model for the VLA, enabling agents to reason about temporal dynamics for future evolution during action generation. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a "think-while-acting" paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.
The heterogeneity between high-level vision-language understanding and low-level action control remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. Although recent methods have advanced task-specific action alignment, they often struggle to generate robust and accurate actions for novel or semantically related tasks. To address this, we propose the Language-Grounded Decoupled Action Representation (LaDA) framework, which leverages natural language as a semantic bridge to connect perception and control. LaDA introduces a fine-grained intermediate layer of three interpretable action primitives--translation, rotation, and gripper control--providing explicit semantic structure for low-level actions. It further employs a semantic-guided soft-label contrastive learning objective to align similar action primitives across tasks, enhancing generalization and motion consistency. An adaptive weighting strategy, inspired by curriculum learning, dynamically balances contrastive and imitation objectives for stable and effective training. Extensive experiments on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO and MimicGen) and real-world demonstrations validate that LaDA achieves strong performance and generalizes effectively to unseen or related tasks.
STRNet: Visual Navigation with Spatio-Temporal Representation through Dynamic Graph Aggregation
PDF ↗Visual navigation requires the robot to reach a specified goal such as an image, based on a sequence of first-person visual observations. While recent learning-based approaches have made significant progress, they often focus on improving policy heads or decision strategies while relying on simplistic feature encoders and temporal pooling to represent visual input. This leads to the loss of fine-grained spatial and temporal structure, ultimately limiting accurate action prediction and progress estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified spatio-temporal representation framework that enhances visual encoding for robotic navigation. Our approach extracts features from both image sequences and goal observations, and fuses them using the designed spatio-temporal fusion module. This module performs spatial graph reasoning within each frame and models temporal dynamics using a hybrid temporal shift module combined with multi-resolution difference-aware convolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves navigation performance and offers a generalizable visual backbone for goal-conditioned control. Code is available at https://github.com/hren20/STRNet.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great performance in robotic manipulation by mapping visual observations and language instructions directly to actions. However, they remain brittle under distribution shifts: when test scenarios change, VLAs often reproduce memorized trajectories instead of adapting to the updated scene, which is a failure mode we refer to as the "Memory Trap". This limitation stems from the end-to-end design, which lacks explicit 3D spatial reasoning and prevents reliable identification of actionable regions in unfamiliar environments. To compensate for this missing spatial understanding, 3D Spatial Affordance Fields (SAFs) can provide a geometric representation that highlights where interactions are physically feasible, offering explicit cues about regions the robot should approach or avoid. We therefore introduce Affordance Field Intervention (AFI), a lightweight hybrid framework that uses SAFs as an on-demand plug-in to guide VLA behavior. Our system detects memory traps through proprioception, repositions the robot to recent high-affordance regions, and proposes affordance-driven waypoints that anchor VLA-generated actions. A SAF-based scorer then selects trajectories with the highest cumulative affordance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 23.5% across different VLA backbones (pi-0 and pi-0.5) under out-of-distribution scenarios on real-world robotic platforms, and 20.2% on the LIBERO-Pro benchmark, validating its effectiveness in enhancing VLA robustness to distribution shifts. Project page: https://vla-afi.github.io/.
Accurate robot segmentation is a fundamental capability for robotic perception. It enables precise visual servoing for VLA systems, scalable robot-centric data augmentation, accurate real-to-sim transfer, and reliable safety monitoring in dynamic human-robot environments. Despite the strong capabilities of modern segmentation models, surprisingly it remains challenging to segment robots. This is due to robot embodiment diversity, appearance ambiguity, structural complexity, and rapid shape changes. Embracing these challenges, we introduce RobotSeg, a foundation model for robot segmentation in image and video. RobotSeg is built upon the versatile SAM 2 foundation model but addresses its three limitations for robot segmentation, namely the lack of adaptation to articulated robots, reliance on manual prompts, and the need for per-frame training mask annotations, by introducing a structure-enhanced memory associator, a robot prompt generator, and a label-efficient training strategy. These innovations collectively enable a structure-aware, automatic, and label-efficient solution. We further construct the video robot segmentation (VRS) dataset comprising over 2.8k videos (138k frames) with diverse robot embodiments and environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RobotSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance on both images and videos, establishing a strong foundation for future advances in robot perception.
In real-world robotic manipulation, states typically admit a neighborhood of near-equivalent actions. That is, for each state, there exist a feasible action neighborhood (FAN) rather than a single correct action, within which motions yield indistinguishable progress. However, prevalent VLA training methodologies are directly inherited from linguistic settings and do not exploit the FAN property, thus leading to poor generalization and low sample efficiency. To address this limitation, we introduce a FAN-guided regularizer that shapes the model's output distribution to align with the geometry of FAN. Concretely, we introduce a Gaussian prior that promotes locally smooth and unimodal predictions around the preferred direction and magnitude. In extensive experiments across both reinforced finetuning (RFT) and supervised finetuning (SFT), our method achieves significant improvement in sample efficiency, and success rate in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. By aligning with the intrinsic action tolerance of physical manipulation, FAN-guided regularization provides a principled and practical method for sample-efficient, and generalizable VLA adaptation. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haochen-Niu/FAN-VLA.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making.
Long-horizon robotic manipulation is increasingly important for real-world deployment, requiring spatial disambiguation in complex layouts and temporal resilience under dynamic interaction. However, existing end-to-end and hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often rely on text-only cues while keeping plan intent latent, which undermines referential grounding in cluttered or underspecified scenes, impedes effective task decomposition of long-horizon goals with close-loop interaction, and limits causal explanation by obscuring the rationale behind action choices. To address these issues, we first introduce Visual Sketch, an implausible visual intermediate that renders points, boxes, arrows, and typed relations in the robot's current views to externalize spatial intent, connect language to scene geometry, and provide a human-verifiable bridge between high-level reasoning and low-level control. Building on Visual Sketch, we present Action-Sketcher, a VLA framework that operates in a cyclic See -> Think -> Sketch -> Act workflow coordinated by adaptive token-gated strategy for reasoning triggers, sketch revision, and action issuance, thereby supporting reactive corrections and human interaction while preserving real-time action prediction. To enable scalable training and evaluation, we curate diverse corpus with interleaved images, text, Visual Sketch supervision, and action sequences, and train Action-Sketcher with a multi-stage curriculum recipe that combines interleaved sequence alignment for modality unification, language-to-sketch consistency for precise linguistic grounding, and imitation learning augmented with sketch-to-action reinforcement for robustness. Extensive experiments on cluttered scenes and multi-object tasks, in simulation and on real-world tasks, show improved long-horizon success, stronger robustness to dynamic scene changes, and enhanced interpretability via editable sketches and step-wise plans.
Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) have been widely adopted for robot motion planning due to their robustness and theoretical guarantees. However, existing RRT-based planners require explicit goal configurations specified as numerical joint angles, while many practical applications provide goal specifications through visual observations such as images or demonstration videos where precise goal configurations are unavailable. In this paper, we propose visual-RRT (vRRT), a motion planner that enables visual-goal planning by unifying gradient-based exploitation from differentiable robot rendering with sampling-based exploration from RRTs. We further introduce (1) a frontier-based exploration-exploitation strategy that adaptively prioritizes visually promising search regions, and (2) inertial gradient tree expansion that inherits optimization states across tree branches for momentum-consistent gradient exploitation. Extensive experiments across various robot manipulators including Franka, UR5e, and Fetch demonstrate that vRRT achieves effective visual-goal planning in both simulated and real-world settings, bridging the gap between sampling-based planning and vision-centric robot applications. Our code is available at https://sgvr.kaist.ac.kr/Visual-RRT.
The integration of vision-language models (VLMs) is driving a new generation of embodied agents capable of operating in human-centered environments. However, as deployment expands, these systems face growing safety risks, particularly when executing hazardous instructions. Current safety evaluation benchmarks remain limited: they cover only narrow scopes of hazards and focus primarily on final outcomes, neglecting the agent's full perception-planning-execution process and thereby obscuring critical failure modes. Therefore, we present SAFE, a benchmark for systematically assessing the safety of embodied VLM agents on hazardous instructions. SAFE comprises three components: SAFE-THOR, an extensible adversarial simulation sandbox with a universal adapter that maps high-level VLM outputs to low-level embodied controls, supporting diverse agent workflow integration; SAFE-VERSE, a risk-aware task suite inspired by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, comprising 45 adversarial scenarios, 1,350 hazardous tasks, and 9,900 instructions that span risks to humans, environments, and agents; and SAFE-DIAGNOSE, a multi-level and fine-grained evaluation protocol measuring agent performance across perception, planning, and execution. Applying SAFE to nine state-of-the-art VLMs and two embodied agent workflows, we uncover systematic failures in translating hazard recognition into safe planning and execution. Our findings reveal fundamental limitations in current safety alignment and demonstrate the necessity of a comprehensive, multi-stage evaluation for developing safer embodied intelligence.