Papers

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

Large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models provide powerful priors for robot manipulation, yet adapting them to a specific deployment remains challenging. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on task-specific demonstrations provides a step toward deployment, but faces two persistent limitations: static data provide limited coverage of out-of-distribution states, and standard imitation objectives do not distinguish progressing behavior from less useful data. Interactive post-training can address these limitations, but typically requires repeated policy execution and human intervention on a physical robot. We introduce HIL-UMI, a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) framework for robot-free human-in-the-loop VLA post-training. During handheld UMI demonstrations, HIL-UMI queries the current policy on the same observation stream without executing its predictions. The Energy Score compares the human action trajectory with policy inference and triggers collection when their discrepancy indicates an out-of-distribution region. In a separate feedback loop, low online advantage predictions identify essential segments for refining a progress-based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then guides advantage-conditioned behavioral cloning using a balanced mixture of base demonstrations and new policy data. This design preserves the iterative and policy-aware nature of human-in-the-loop learning while decoupling data collection from robot deployment. Experiments on four real-world tasks spanning long-horizon and precise manipulation show that HIL-UMI achieves consistent improvement over SFT and benefits from both targeted collection and advantage refinement. Moreover, HIL-UMI outperforms HG-DAgger on Clean Up Table with lower per-frame collection time, suggesting a scalable path for VLA post-training across operators and locations.

VLAHuman-in-the-LoopPost-trainingHan, Zimu, Zeng, Yiming, Zhang, Jiyao·Sep 17, 2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in π_0.5. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to π_0.5, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains π_0.5's robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming π_0.5 on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

VLAEfficient InferenceSingle-Step Action GenerationHosseinkhani, Kian, Peng, Qinhe, Shramko, George·Sep 10, 2026

LEGS: Fine-Tuning Teleop-Free VLAs for Humanoid Loco-manipulation in an Embodied Gaussian Splatting World

Training vision-language-action (VLA) policies for humanoid loco-manipulation is constrained by the high cost and complexity of collecting human teleoperation demonstrations. VLA policies fine-tuned in simulators have, until now, failed to transfer effectively in humanoid loco-manipulation tasks. We present LEGS (Loco-manipulation via Embodied Gaussian Splatting), a hybrid simulator that composites a mesh foreground (robot, objects, props) over a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) background reconstructed from a handheld scene capture. LEGS uses a procedural motion-primitive generator to synthesize labeled demonstrations at scale without human teleoperation, and a deterministic two-stage color calibration to align the rendered 3DGS image to the robot's deployment camera. On a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, across three pick-and-place tasks of increasing whole-body difficulty and three VLA backbones (psi_0, pi_0.5, GR00T N1.6), a policy trained purely on LEGS data matches or exceeds one trained on human teleoperation demos on every experiment. It also outperforms a mesh-only simulation baseline that ablates the effect of the 3DGS background, showing that photorealistic rendering is a key enabler for synthetic data transfer. Humanoid motion is recorded independently of scene appearance in LEGS, allowing the same auto-generated demonstrations to be re-rendered under new backgrounds and object meshes–covering a new scene at more than 15x lower cost than teleoperation–to augment training data for robustness to scene variations. Under combined object-and-scene appearance shift, the policy trained on re-rendered LEGS-AUG data maintains task success while the baseline trained on teleoperation data fails entirely. Our project page is located at https://legsvla.github.io/.

HumanoidVLA3D Gaussian SplattingKim, Hojune, Chen, Timothy, Sun, Jiankai·May 31, 2026

A4A: Cross-Embodiment Transfer of Action-Oriented 4D Affordances from Human Demonstrations

Human demonstrations contain rich manipulation knowledge, but it remains unclear what information can be transferred effectively to robot control. Existing affordance representations are typically formulated as 2D masks, 3D regions, contact points, or actionability scores, and therefore primarily identify where interaction may occur. However, effective manipulation also requires modeling how interaction-relevant geometry evolves during task execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce action-oriented 4D affordances, which represent the language-conditioned future trajectories of interaction-relevant 3D points. These trajectories capture task-conditioned geometric evolution rather than embodiment-specific actions, enabling transferable interaction priors across humans and robots. Based on this representation, we construct a large-scale action-oriented 4D affordance dataset from existing human–object interaction video data and complementary RGB-D demonstrations, and introduce A4A, an affordance-to-action framework that uses 4D affordance trajectory prediction to pretrain robot policies before manipulation fine-tuning. Experiments in both simulation and the real world validate the effectiveness of A4A, showing that pretraining with action-oriented 4D affordance data consistently improves the manipulation performance of diverse VLA policies. These results establish action-oriented 4D affordances as an effective cross-embodiment representation for transferring manipulation knowledge from human demonstrations to robot control.

VLAAffordance4D AffordanceYifan Han, Litao Liu, Yuqi Gu·Sep 5, 2026

Harness VLA: Steering Frozen VLAs into Reliable Manipulation Primitives via Memory-Guided Agents

Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong local visuomotor skills, but they are trained on in-distribution task trajectories and often fail under deployment perturbations such as semantic retargeting, goal re-binding, spatial-layout shifts, and unstable local contacts. LLM coding agents provide complementary semantic and compositional reasoning, but purely analytic primitives struggle with irregular grasping, constrained placement, and articulated-object interaction. We present Harness VLA, a memory-augmented agentic framework that exposes a frozen VLA as a retryable contact-rich primitive and composes it with a small fixed library of analytic primitives for grounding, staging, transport, navigation, and release. Rather than expanding the skill library, the harness learns the operating range of these fixed primitives from task-specific execution traces, global success rules, and failure models. By lifting semantic re-grounding, non-contact execution, and VLA re-staging to the planner while reserving the frozen VLA for local contact-rich phases, Harness VLA extends pretrained VLAs beyond their original trajectory distribution without finetuning. Across perturbed tabletop, household kitchen, and clean-to-randomized bimanual manipulation, Harness VLA improves over the strongest relevant baselines by 38.6 and 27.1 percentage points on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa365, respectively, and reaches 58.4% on RoboTwin C2R. Code is available at https://github.com/RLinf/RPent.

VLARobot ManipulationLLM AgentYixian Zhang, Huanming Zhang, Feng Gao·Jul 9, 2026

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requires continuous geometry-aware whole-body adaptation, including coordinated arm placement, torso adjustment, and gait modulation for collision-free movement through complex 3D spaces. We introduce TANGO, the first whole-body vision-language navigation framework for language-conditioned humanoid traversal in cluttered environments. Given a natural-language instruction and egocentric RGB observations, TANGO directly predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions for downstream whole-body control. We train TANGO entirely in simulation by synthesizing diverse collision-free traversal behaviors via global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. This pipeline provides dynamically feasible action supervision for learning language-conditioned whole-body policies. In extensive simulation experiments, TANGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in vision-language navigation, while outperforming strong modular baselines in navigating challenging scenes requiring obstacle negotiation. Lastly, we deploy TANGO zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, and observe robust language-guided traversal in cluttered real-world scenes without training on any real-world navigation data.

HumanoidVLANavigationAnqi Li, Yuxin Chen, Zhaobo Li·Sep 8, 2026

VLA-Corrector: Lightweight Detect-and-Correct Inference for Adaptive Action Horizon

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently achieved strong progress in embodied intelligence. To reduce policy-call frequency while preserving temporal coherence, most generative policies adopt an action chunk mechanism, executing multiple future actions in an open-loop manner under a fixed action horizon. However, this "predict-then-blindly-execute" paradigm sacrifices closed-loop reactivity: in contact-rich physical interactions, even small local perturbations can rapidly amplify within the open-loop blind spot, leading to compounding errors and ultimately task failure. To address this limitation, we propose VLA-Corrector, a lightweight corrective inference framework for action-chunked VLA policies. Without modifying the backbone policy weights, VLA-Corrector introduces a lightweight Latent-space Vision Monitor (LVM) that continuously compares predicted and actual visual feature evolution, enabling online detection of visual dynamics deviations. Once persistent deviation is detected, the system triggers a truncation event, discards the remaining stale actions, and invokes corrective replanning via Online Gradient Guidance (OGG). The detect-and-correct mechanism of VLA-Corrector naturally induces an event-triggered adaptive action horizon: it preserves long-horizon execution when the current chunk remains reliable, and invokes short-horizon corrective replanning when execution begins to drift. In doing so, VLA-Corrector mitigates the trade-off imposed by static horizons between execution robustness and policy-call frequency. It can be integrated into different VLA models without further retraining the VLA backbone, interrupting compounding errors while preserving much of the efficiency benefit of action chunking and substantially improving robustness in long-horizon, contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks.

VLARobotic ManipulationAction chunkingYi Pan, Miao Pan, Qi Lu·Jul 2, 2026

π0.7: a Steerable Generalist Robotic Foundation Model with Emergent Capabilities

π0.7 is a steerable generalist robotic foundation model conditioned on diverse multimodal context—language commands, subgoal images, and task metadata—enabling strong out-of-the-box performance in unseen environments, zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer, and emergent capabilities matching RL-finetuned specialists.

Robot foundation modelsVLAvision-language-actionPhysical Intelligence, Bo Ai, Ali Amin·Apr 16, 2026

N₀-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence

We present N₀-Foundation, a paradigm for tactile-enabled embodied manipulation, which integrates tactile sensing hardware, large-scale multimodal data, tactile representation learning, and standardized evaluation. First, we engineer the infrastructure for scalable data collection, including a vision-based tactile sensor, a tactile Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), and a synchronized visuo-tactile data collection system supporting both robot embodiments and UMI-based demonstrations. Leveraging this infrastructure, we construct NeoData, which contains more than 30000 hours of synchronized visual and tactile demonstrations, spanning six embodiments, 450 tasks, and billions of paired RGB and tactile frames collected through a mixture of real-robot teleoperation and UMI-based demonstrations. To facilitate open research, we further release OpenNeoData, a 5000-hour open-source subset of NeoData. The dataset addresses a central limitation of existing manipulation corpora, critical for deformable-object manipulation, precise assembly, delicate force control, and sustained surface interaction. Capitalizing on the large-scale, heterogeneous tactile measurements, we propose NeoForce, a visuo-tactile representation model that learn transferable tactile representations across different sensor designs. To enable systematic evaluation of tactile embodied models built upon our infrastructure, datasets and tactile representations, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark, which combines the real-world NeoReal suite and the simulated NeoSim suite for standardized evaluation. Experiments across both suites show that policies benefit from the physical contact state rather than from the device-specific appearance of the tactile signal. We release the dataset, the representation, and the benchmark, aiming at supporting future work on tactile-enabled embodied manipulation.

UMIVLATactile Perception NeoteAI Team, Fudan TEAI Team·Aug 30, 2026

FlashVLA: Streaming Action Decoding for Fast and Asynchronous VLA Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly promising for robotic manipulation, yet their real-world deployment remains bottlenecked by high inference latency and unstable asynchronous execution. This challenge is particularly pronounced in flow-matching-based VLA models, where action decoding requires multiple iterative steps conditioned on the VLM context. While efficient inference methods improve control frequency and asynchronous methods reduce execution idle time, existing approaches often fail to jointly achieve low-latency inference and accurate, temporally consistent asynchronous execution. We introduce FlashVLA, a streaming action decoding framework that addresses both challenges in a unified formulation. FlashVLA maintains a streaming action buffer with multiple chunks at different noise levels and decodes them using chunk-wise causal attention. This design allows FlashVLA to produce one executable action chunk per inference step. Moreover, its chunk-wise autoregressive formulation implicitly preserves action continuity, enabling smooth asynchronous execution without extra future-state conditioning. Across extensive simulated and real-world experiments, FlashVLA substantially improves inference speed while maintaining strong task performance. It can achieve ≥30 Hz control frequency on a single GPU with smooth asynchronous inference in real-world deployment.

VLAFlow MatchingNVIDIAZekai Li, Jiaming Tang, Zhijian Liu·Aug 27, 2026

GigaBrain-0.7: Scaling Embodied Foundation Models to Emergent Capabilities with a Three-System Architecture

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have become a dominant paradigm for generalist embodied agents, demonstrating strong complex and long-horizon task completion in structured settings. Yet it remains an open question whether current VLA systems can benefit from more effective architectural design, scale to substantially larger and more heterogeneous data regimes, and achieve broader generalization across tasks and embodiments. To this end, we present GigaBrain-0.7, an embodied foundation model with substantially improved generalization across diverse robot embodiments. Specifically, GigaBrain-0.7 unifies understanding, prediction, and action through a three-system architecture, scales pretraining to over 37,000 hours of heterogeneous embodied data, and introduces one-stage alignment training that jointly optimizes vision-language understanding and multi-embodiment action generation. Compared with the preceding GigaBrain-0 series and prior state-of-the-art models including π_0.5, GigaBrain-0.7 achieves substantial improvements in foundation zero-shot capabilities, language-conditioned instruction following, and post-training task success rates. In particular, on our in-house Maker H01 platform and mainstream robot embodiments, GigaBrain-0.7 demonstrates strong task adaptability and completion ability across both home and industrial scenarios. All training code and pretrained model weights will be released.

VLAGigaBrainFlow Matching GigaBrain Team, Angen Ye, Axiang Sun·Aug 16, 2026

Zetta ζ: An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence

Zetta is a closed-loop embodied harness that keeps the base VLA frozen and evolves code-based runtime critics and recovery skills through three timescale-separated loops: action-frequency governance, rollout-batch failure diagnosis, and validation-gated skill updates. With the Z-Infra rollout infrastructure (20.6x throughput), it reaches 90.8% on LIBERO-Pro and 93.6% on RoboCasa, with zero-shot skill transfer and robotic Aha moments.

Embodied AIVLAAgentic HarnessXin Ding, Liang Mi, Mingzhe Huang·Aug 17, 2026