5arXiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence)·
Cortex: Bidirectionally aligned VLM-VLA framework for long-horizon robot manipulation
Cortex is a new embodied agent framework that bridges the semantic gap between high-level Vision-Language Model (VLM) planning and low-level Vision-Language-Action (VLA) execution for long-horizon robotic manipulation. The system standardizes manipulation into 32 canonical skill primitives and uses an event-balanced sampling strategy to handle subtask transition ambiguity, enabling automatic annotation of over 4,000 hours of video data. Cortex outperforms monolithic baselines by 3.1% on Libero-long and 4.1% on RoboTwin benchmarks, and demonstrates zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world tasks such as multi-stage chemistry experiments.
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LabVLA: Vision-Language-Action model and RoboGenesis data engine for scientific laboratory robotics
Researchers introduce LabVLA, a Vision-Language-Action model designed to bridge written scientific protocols and physical robot execution in laboratory settings. To address the data scarcity problem, they build RoboGenesis, a simulation-based data engine that composes lab workflows from atomic skills and generates structured demonstrations across robot embodiments. LabVLA uses a two-stage training recipe combining FAST action token pretraining on a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct backbone with flow matching posttraining via a DiT action expert. On the LabUtopia benchmark, LabVLA achieves the highest average success rate among evaluated baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.
SpatialClaw: Code-as-action interface for agentic 3D/4D spatial reasoning with VLMs
SpatialClaw is a training-free framework that uses code execution as the action interface for vision-language model agents performing spatial reasoning tasks. The system maintains a stateful Python kernel with perception and geometry primitives, allowing the VLM to write iterative executable cells conditioned on prior outputs rather than committing to a full strategy upfront. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks covering static and dynamic 3D/4D tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the prior state-of-the-art spatial agent by +11.2 points across six VLM backbones.
CHORUS: Single VLA policy enables decentralized multi-robot collaboration without inter-robot communication
CHORUS is a framework that adapts a single vision-language-action (VLA) backbone to control diverse multi-robot teams in a fully decentralized manner, with each robot running an independent copy conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. Real-world experiments across tasks like tape measurement, book handovers, and laundry basket lifting show a 64-percentage-point improvement over decentralized from-scratch models and 40-point improvement in reactivity to teammate behavior, while outperforming centralized baselines. The key insight is that pretrained VLA visuomotor priors are sufficient to enable reactive coordination without explicit inter-robot communication or alignment procedures at inference time.
InSight: Self-guided autonomous skill acquisition for vision-language-action models via primitive steerability
InSight is a framework enabling VLA models to autonomously acquire new manipulation skills beyond their training data by decomposing demonstrations into labeled primitive actions (e.g., 'move gripper to bowl', 'pour the bottle') and running a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives, attempts demonstrations, and integrates successful ones back into training. The system requires no human demonstrations of target skills and is evaluated on simulation and real-world tasks including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, and pouring. Learned primitives can be composed for novel long-horizon tasks, offering a practical path toward continual skill acquisition in robotic VLA policies.
VLK: Synthetic vision-language-kinematics supervision enables humanoid loco-manipulation from egocentric observations
Researchers introduce a pipeline that generates 48,000 paired vision-language-kinematics trajectories synthetically using 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct indoor scenes, bypassing the need for expensive human-annotated robot data. A VLK policy trained on this data predicts whole-body kinematic trajectories from egocentric images and language instructions, which a whole-body tracker converts to physical actions. The approach is validated on a Unitree G1 humanoid performing navigation and object transport, demonstrating viable sim-to-real transfer for perception-based loco-manipulation.
CamVLA: Calibration-free view-robust Vision-Language-Action model for robot deployment
Researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy introduce CamVLA, a Vision-Language-Action model that eliminates the need for explicit camera calibration during robot deployment. The model decouples manipulation controls from camera geometry by predicting camera-centric end-effector actions and a 6-DoF hand-eye matrix, composing them into robot base-frame actions via deterministic geometric transformation. Operating on a single monocular RGB image without depth or calibration data, CamVLA improves success rates across diverse unseen viewpoints in both simulation and real-world evaluations.
CoorDex: Learning pipeline for continuous dexterous humanoid loco-manipulation with high-DoF hands
CoorDex is a reinforcement learning pipeline that enables humanoid robots to perform dexterous manipulation while walking, eliminating the stop-and-go pattern common in prior work. The approach trains separate privileged motion tracking teachers for body and hand, distills them into latent priors, and uses coordinated residual RL to compose them for downstream tasks. Demonstrated on a Unitree G1 humanoid with a 20-DoF WUJI hand, the system achieves non-stop bottle grasping, fridge door opening, and cube manipulation in motion. Ablations show that naive joint-space or monolithic approaches fail under the same reward budget, validating the latent-prior architecture.
SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data
Hugging Face introduces SmolVLA, a compact Vision-Language-Action model designed for robotics control, trained on community-contributed data from the LeRobot ecosystem. The model targets efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware while maintaining competitive manipulation performance. This release represents a continuation of Hugging Face's strategy to democratize robotics AI through open community data pipelines.