Daily Papers

Temporal context is essential for robotic manipulation because such tasks are inherently non-Markovian, yet mainstream VLA models typically overlook it and struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived representations for immediate control, while the hippocampal system preserves verbatim episodic details and semantic gist of past experience for long-term memory. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA, a Cognition-Memory-Action framework for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens that form working memory, while a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics consolidated from it. Working memory retrieves decision-relevant entries from the bank, adaptively fuses them with current tokens, and updates the bank by merging redundancies. Using these tokens, a memory-conditioned diffusion action expert yields temporally aware action sequences. We evaluate MemoryVLA on 150+ simulation and real-world tasks across three robots. On SimplerEnv-Bridge, Fractal, and LIBERO-5 suites, it achieves 71.9%, 72.7%, and 96.5% success rates, respectively, all outperforming state-of-the-art baselines CogACT and pi-0, with a notable +14.6 gain on Bridge. On 12 real-world tasks spanning general skills and long-horizon temporal dependencies, MemoryVLA achieves 84.0% success rate, with long-horizon tasks showing a +26 improvement over state-of-the-art baseline. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions to robot actions. However, prevailing VLA decoders either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order or attach continuous diffusion or flow matching heads outside the backbone, demanding specialized training and iterative sampling that hinder a unified, scalable architecture. We present Discrete Diffusion VLA, a single-transformer policy that models discretized action chunks with discrete diffusion and is trained with the same cross-entropy objective as the VLM backbone. The design retains diffusion's progressive refinement paradigm while remaining natively compatible with the discrete token interface of VLMs. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves easy action elements before harder ones and uses secondary remasking to revisit uncertain predictions across refinement rounds, which improves consistency and enables robust error correction. This unified decoder preserves pretrained vision language priors, supports parallel decoding, breaks the autoregressive bottleneck, and reduces the number of function evaluations. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.3% avg. SR on LIBERO, 71.2% visual matching on SimplerEnv Fractal and 49.3% overall on SimplerEnv Bridge, improving over both autoregressive and continuous diffusion baselines. These findings indicate that discrete-diffusion action decoder supports precise action modeling and consistent training, laying groundwork for scaling VLA to larger models and datasets.

While autoregressive Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success, their sequential generation often limits their efficacy in complex visual planning and dynamic robotic control. In this work, we investigate the potential of constructing Vision-Language Models upon diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) to overcome these limitations. We introduce Dream-VL, an open diffusion-based VLM (dVLM) that achieves state-of-the-art performance among previous dVLMs. Dream-VL is comparable to top-tier AR-based VLMs trained on open data on various benchmarks but exhibits superior potential when applied to visual planning tasks. Building upon Dream-VL, we introduce Dream-VLA, a dLLM-based Vision-Language-Action model (dVLA) developed through continuous pre-training on open robotic datasets. We demonstrate that the natively bidirectional nature of this diffusion backbone serves as a superior foundation for VLA tasks, inherently suited for action chunking and parallel generation, leading to significantly faster convergence in downstream fine-tuning. Dream-VLA achieves top-tier performance of 97.2% average success rate on LIBERO, 71.4% overall average on SimplerEnv-Bridge, and 60.5% overall average on SimplerEnv-Fractal, surpassing leading models such as π_0 and GR00T-N1. We also validate that dVLMs surpass AR baselines on downstream tasks across different training objectives. We release both Dream-VL and Dream-VLA to facilitate further research in the community.

Robotic generalization relies on physical intelligence: the ability to reason about state changes, contact-rich interactions, and long-horizon planning under egocentric perception and action. However, most VLMs are trained primarily on third-person data, creating a fundamental viewpoint mismatch for humanoid robots. Scaling robot egocentric data collection remains impractical due to high cost and limited diversity, whereas large-scale human egocentric videos offer a scalable alternative that naturally capture rich interaction context and causal structure. The key challenge is to convert raw egocentric videos into structured and reliable embodiment training supervision. Accordingly, we propose an Egocentric2Embodiment translation pipeline that transforms first-person videos into multi-level, schema-driven VQA supervision with enforced evidence grounding and temporal consistency, enabling the construction of the Egocentric2Embodiment dataset (E2E-3M) at scale. An egocentric-aware embodied brain, termed PhysBrain, is obtained by training on the E2E-3M dataset. PhysBrain exhibits substantially improved egocentric understanding, particularly for planning on EgoThink. It provides an egocentric-aware initialization that enables more sample-efficient VLA fine-tuning and higher SimplerEnv success rates (53.9\%), demonstrating effective transfer from human egocentric supervision to downstream robot control.

Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have garnered significant attention for their potential in advancing robotic manipulation. However, previous approaches predominantly rely on the general comprehension capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) to generate action signals, often overlooking the rich temporal and causal structure embedded in visual observations. In this paper, we present UniVLA, a unified and native multimodal VLA model that autoregressively models vision, language, and action signals as discrete token sequences. This formulation enables flexible multimodal tasks learning, particularly from large-scale video data. By incorporating world modeling during post-training, UniVLA captures causal dynamics from videos, facilitating effective transfer to downstream policy learning--especially for long-horizon tasks. Our approach sets new state-of-the-art results across several widely used simulation benchmarks, including CALVIN, LIBERO, and Simplenv-Bridge, significantly surpassing previous methods. For example, UniVLA achieves 95.5% average success rate on LIBERO benchmark, surpassing pi0-FAST's 85.5%. We further demonstrate its broad applicability on real-world ALOHA manipulation and autonomous driving.