AnchorVLA4D: an Anchor-Based Spatial-Temporal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Since current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems suffer from limited spatial perception and the absence of memory throughout manipulation, we investigate visual anchors as a means to enhance spatial and temporal reasoning within VLA policies for robotic manipulation. Conventional VLAs generate actions by conditioning on a single current frame together with a language instruction. However, since the frame is encoded as a 2D image, it does not contain detailed spatial information, and the VLA similarly lacks any means to incorporate past context. As a result, it frequently forgets objects under occlusion and becomes spatially disoriented during the manipulation process. Thus, we propose AnchorVLA4D, a simple spatial-temporal VLA that augments the visual input with an anchor image to preserve the initial scene context throughout execution, and adds a lightweight spatial encoder that jointly processes the anchor and current frames to expose geometric relationships within an episode. Built on a Qwen2.5-VL backbone with a diffusion-based action head, AnchorVLA4D requires no additional sensing modalities (e.g., depth or point clouds) and introduces negligible inference overhead. Combining anchoring with a frozen pretrained spatial encoder yields further gains, realizing a 13.6% improvement on the Simpler WidowX benchmark and confirming the approach on real-world tasks, where it achieved an average success rate of 80%.

Efficient Multi-Task Large Model Training via Data Heterogeneity-aware Model Management

Recent foundation models are capable of handling multiple machine learning (ML) tasks and multiple data modalities with the unified base model structure and several specialized model components. However, the development of such multi-task (MT) multi-modal (MM) models poses significant model management challenges to existing training systems. Due to the sophisticated model architecture and the heterogeneous workloads of different ML tasks and data modalities, training these models usually requires massive GPU resources and suffers from sub-optimal system efficiency. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve high-performance training of large-scale MT MM models through data heterogeneity-aware model management optimization. The key idea is to decompose the model execution into stages and address the joint optimization problem sequentially, including both heterogeneity-aware workload parallelization and dependency-driven execution scheduling. Based on this, we build a prototype system and evaluate it on various large MT MM models. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our system, with speedup ratio up to 71% compared to state-of-the-art training systems.