FlowVLA: Thinking in Motion with a Visual Chain of Thought

Many Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely on an internal world model trained via next-frame prediction. This approach, however, struggles with physical reasoning as it entangles static appearance with dynamic motion, often resulting in implausible visual forecasts and inefficient policy learning. To address these limitations, we introduce the Visual Chain of Thought (Visual CoT): a pre-training framework that encourages a model to reason about how a scene evolves before predicting what it will look like. We instantiate this principle in FlowVLA, which predicts a future frame ($v_{t+1}$) only after generating an intermediate optical flow representation ($f_t$) that encodes motion dynamics. This ``$v_t \rightarrow f_t \rightarrow v_{t+1}$'' reasoning process is implemented within a single autoregressive Transformer, guiding the model to learn disentangled dynamics. As a result, FlowVLA produces coherent visual predictions and facilitates more efficient policy learning. Experiments on challenging robotics manipulation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with substantially improved sample efficiency, pointing toward a more principled foundation for world modeling. Project page: https://irpn-lab.github.io/FlowVLA/

ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robotic agents to integrate multimodal understanding with action execution. However, our empirical analysis reveals that current VLAs struggle to allocate visual attention to target regions. Instead, visual attention is always dispersed. To guide the visual attention grounding on the correct target, we propose ReconVLA, a reconstructive VLA model with an implicit grounding paradigm. Conditioned on the model's visual outputs, a diffusion transformer aims to reconstruct the gaze region of the image, which corresponds to the target manipulated objects. This process prompts the VLA model to learn fine-grained representations and accurately allocate visual attention, thus effectively leveraging task-specific visual information and conducting precise manipulation. Moreover, we curate a large-scale pretraining dataset comprising over 100k trajectories and 2 million data samples from open-source robotic datasets, further boosting the model's generalization in visual reconstruction. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate the superiority of our implicit grounding method, showcasing its capabilities of precise manipulation and generalization. Our project page is https://zionchow.github.io/ReconVLA/.

Small-Large Collaboration: Training-efficient Concept Personalization for Large VLM using a Meta Personalized Small VLM

Personalizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to transform them into daily assistants has emerged as a trending research direction. However, leading companies like OpenAI continue to increase model size and develop complex designs such as the chain of thought (CoT). While large VLMs are proficient in complex multi-modal understanding, their high training costs and limited access via paid APIs restrict direct personalization. Conversely, small VLMs are easily personalized and freely available, but they lack sufficient reasoning capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a novel collaborative framework named Small-Large Collaboration (SLC) for large VLM personalization, where the small VLM is responsible for generating personalized information, while the large model integrates this personalized information to deliver accurate responses. To effectively incorporate personalized information, we develop a test-time reflection strategy, preventing the potential hallucination of the small VLM. Since SLC only needs to train a meta personalized small VLM for the large VLMs, the overall process is training-efficient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first training-efficient framework that supports both open-source and closed-source large VLMs, enabling broader real-world personalized applications. We conduct thorough experiments across various benchmarks and large VLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SLC framework. The code will be released at https://github.com/Hhankyangg/SLC.

DexVLG: Dexterous Vision-Language-Grasp Model at Scale

As large models gain traction, vision-language-action (VLA) systems are enabling robots to tackle increasingly complex tasks. However, limited by the difficulty of data collection, progress has mainly focused on controlling simple gripper end-effectors. There is little research on functional grasping with large models for human-like dexterous hands. In this paper, we introduce DexVLG, a large Vision-Language-Grasp model for Dexterous grasp pose prediction aligned with language instructions using single-view RGBD input. To accomplish this, we generate a dataset of 170 million dexterous grasp poses mapped to semantic parts across 174,000 objects in simulation, paired with detailed part-level captions. This large-scale dataset, named DexGraspNet 3.0, is used to train a VLM and flow-matching-based pose head capable of producing instruction-aligned grasp poses for tabletop objects. To assess DexVLG's performance, we create benchmarks in physics-based simulations and conduct real-world experiments. Extensive testing demonstrates DexVLG's strong zero-shot generalization capabilities-achieving over 76% zero-shot execution success rate and state-of-the-art part-grasp accuracy in simulation-and successful part-aligned grasps on physical objects in real-world scenarios.

Compositional Attribute Imbalance in Vision Datasets

Visual attribute imbalance is a common yet underexplored issue in image classification, significantly impacting model performance and generalization. In this work, we first define the first-level and second-level attributes of images and then introduce a CLIP-based framework to construct a visual attribute dictionary, enabling automatic evaluation of image attributes. By systematically analyzing both single-attribute imbalance and compositional attribute imbalance, we reveal how the rarity of attributes affects model performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose adjusting the sampling probability of samples based on the rarity of their compositional attributes. This strategy is further integrated with various data augmentation techniques (such as CutMix, Fmix, and SaliencyMix) to enhance the model's ability to represent rare attributes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates attribute imbalance, thereby improving the robustness and fairness of deep neural networks. Our research highlights the importance of modeling visual attribute distributions and provides a scalable solution for long-tail image classification tasks.

CEED-VLA: Consistency Vision-Language-Action Model with Early-Exit Decoding

In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a vital research direction in robotics due to their impressive multimodal understanding and generalization capabilities. Despite the progress, their practical deployment is severely constrained by inference speed bottlenecks, particularly in high-frequency and dexterous manipulation tasks. While recent studies have explored Jacobi decoding as a more efficient alternative to traditional autoregressive decoding, its practical benefits are marginal due to the lengthy iterations. To address it, we introduce consistency distillation training to predict multiple correct action tokens in each iteration, thereby achieving acceleration. Besides, we design mixed-label supervision to mitigate the error accumulation during distillation. Although distillation brings acceptable speedup, we identify that certain inefficient iterations remain a critical bottleneck. To tackle this, we propose an early-exit decoding strategy that moderately relaxes convergence conditions, which further improves average inference efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves more than 4 times inference acceleration across different baselines while maintaining high task success rates in both simulated and real-world robot tasks. These experiments validate that our approach provides an efficient and general paradigm for accelerating multimodal decision-making in robotics. Our project page is available at https://irpn-eai.github.io/CEED-VLA/.

RationalVLA: A Rational Vision-Language-Action Model with Dual System

A fundamental requirement for real-world robotic deployment is the ability to understand and respond to natural language instructions. Existing language-conditioned manipulation tasks typically assume that instructions are perfectly aligned with the environment. This assumption limits robustness and generalization in realistic scenarios where instructions may be ambiguous, irrelevant, or infeasible. To address this problem, we introduce RAtional MAnipulation (RAMA), a new benchmark that challenges models with both unseen executable instructions and defective ones that should be rejected. In RAMA, we construct a dataset with over 14,000 samples, including diverse defective instructions spanning six dimensions: visual, physical, semantic, motion, safety, and out-of-context. We further propose the Rational Vision-Language-Action model (RationalVLA). It is a dual system for robotic arms that integrates the high-level vision-language model with the low-level manipulation policy by introducing learnable latent space embeddings. This design enables RationalVLA to reason over instructions, reject infeasible commands, and execute manipulation effectively. Experiments demonstrate that RationalVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on RAMA by a 14.5% higher success rate and 0.94 average task length, while maintaining competitive performance on standard manipulation tasks. Real-world trials further validate its effectiveness and robustness in practical applications. Our project page is https://irpn-eai.github.io/rationalvla.

From Standalone LLMs to Integrated Intelligence: A Survey of Compound Al Systems

Compound Al Systems (CAIS) is an emerging paradigm that integrates large language models (LLMs) with external components, such as retrievers, agents, tools, and orchestrators, to overcome the limitations of standalone models in tasks requiring memory, reasoning, real-time grounding, and multimodal understanding. These systems enable more capable and context-aware behaviors by composing multiple specialized modules into cohesive workflows. Despite growing adoption in both academia and industry, the CAIS landscape remains fragmented, lacking a unified framework for analysis, taxonomy, and evaluation. In this survey, we define the concept of CAIS, propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy based on component roles and orchestration strategies, and analyze four foundational paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LLM Agents, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), and orchestration-centric architectures. We review representative systems, compare design trade-offs, and summarize evaluation methodologies across these paradigms. Finally, we identify key challenges-including scalability, interoperability, benchmarking, and coordination-and outline promising directions for future research. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive foundation for understanding, developing, and advancing the next generation of system-level artificial intelligence.

GraspVLA: a Grasping Foundation Model Pre-trained on Billion-scale Synthetic Action Data

Embodied foundation models are gaining increasing attention for their zero-shot generalization, scalability, and adaptability to new tasks through few-shot post-training. However, existing models rely heavily on real-world data, which is costly and labor-intensive to collect. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective alternative, yet its potential remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we explore the feasibility of training Vision-Language-Action models entirely with large-scale synthetic action data. We curate SynGrasp-1B, a billion-frame robotic grasping dataset generated in simulation with photorealistic rendering and extensive domain randomization. Building on this, we present GraspVLA, a VLA model pretrained on large-scale synthetic action data as a foundational model for grasping tasks. GraspVLA integrates autoregressive perception tasks and flow-matching-based action generation into a unified Chain-of-Thought process, enabling joint training on synthetic action data and Internet semantics data. This design helps mitigate sim-to-real gaps and facilitates the transfer of learned actions to a broader range of Internet-covered objects, achieving open-vocabulary generalization in grasping. Extensive evaluations across real-world and simulation benchmarks demonstrate GraspVLA's advanced zero-shot generalizability and few-shot adaptability to specific human preferences. We will release SynGrasp-1B dataset and pre-trained weights to benefit the community.

GDI-Bench: A Benchmark for General Document Intelligence with Vision and Reasoning Decoupling

The rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has profoundly impacted the document domain, creating a wide array of application scenarios. This progress highlights the need for a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate these models' capabilities across various document-specific tasks. However, existing benchmarks often fail to locate specific model weaknesses or guide systematic improvements. To bridge this gap, we introduce a General Document Intelligence Benchmark (GDI-Bench), featuring 1.9k images across 9 key scenarios and 19 document-specific tasks. By decoupling visual complexity and reasoning complexity, the GDI-Bench structures graded tasks that allow performance assessment by difficulty, aiding in model weakness identification and optimization guidance. We evaluate the GDI-Bench on various open-source and closed-source models, conducting decoupled analyses in the visual and reasoning domains. For instance, the GPT-4o model excels in reasoning tasks but exhibits limitations in visual capabilities. To address the diverse tasks and domains in the GDI-Bench, we propose a GDI Model that mitigates the issue of catastrophic forgetting during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process through a intelligence-preserving training strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on previous benchmarks and the GDI-Bench. Both our benchmark and model will be open source.