Molmo2 delivers state-of-the-art open-weight video VLMs with new grounding datasets and training methods that outperform prior open models and match or exceed some proprietary ones on pointing and tracking tasks.
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MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space
Canonical reference. 82% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Reasoning is central to purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, which limits adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), a class of robotic foundation models that integrate perception, planning, and control through a structured three-stage pipeline. Our model, MolmoAct, encodes observations and instructions into depth-aware perception tokens, generates mid-level spatial plans as editable trajectory traces, and predicts precise low-level actions, enabling explainable and steerable behavior. MolmoAct-7B-D achieves strong performance across simulation and real-world settings: 70.5% zero-shot accuracy on SimplerEnv Visual Matching tasks, surpassing closed-source Pi-0 and GR00T N1.5; 86.6% average success on LIBERO, including an additional 6.3% gain over ThinkAct on long-horizon tasks; and in real-world fine-tuning, an additional 10% (single-arm) and an additional 22.7% (bimanual) task progression over Pi-0-FAST. It also outperforms baselines by an additional 23.3% on out-of-distribution generalization and achieves top human-preference scores for open-ended instruction following and trajectory steering. Furthermore, we release, for the first time, the MolmoAct Dataset -- a mid-training robot dataset comprising over 10,000 high quality robot trajectories across diverse scenarios and tasks. Training with this dataset yields an average 5.5% improvement in general performance over the base model. We release all model weights, training code, our collected dataset, and our action reasoning dataset, establishing MolmoAct as both a state-of-the-art robotics foundation model and an open blueprint for building ARMs that transform perception into purposeful action through structured reasoning. Blogpost: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact
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representative citing papers
CoRAL lets LLMs act as adaptive cost designers for motion planners while using VLM priors and online identification to handle unknown physics, achieving over 50% higher success rates than baselines in unseen contact-rich robotic scenarios.
A multimodal transformer generates and caches interleaved text-image traces to guide closed-loop actions, achieving 92.4% success on LIBERO-Long and 95.5% average on LIBERO.
Being-H0.7 adds future-aware latent reasoning to direct VLA policies via dual-branch alignment on latent queries, matching world-model benefits at VLA efficiency.
CF-VLA uses a coarse initialization over endpoint velocity followed by single-step refinement to achieve strong performance with low inference steps on CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-robot tasks.
Action Images turn robot arm motions into interpretable multiview pixel videos, letting video backbones serve as zero-shot policies for end-to-end robot learning.
Backward token warping in ViT-based MLLMs enables reliable reasoning from nearby viewpoints by preserving semantic coherence better than pixel-wise warping or fine-tuning baselines.
DFM-VLA uses discrete flow matching to iteratively refine action tokens in VLA models, outperforming autoregressive and diffusion baselines with 4.44 average success length on CALVIN and 95.7% success on LIBERO.
PhysGen uses video models to learn physics for robots, outperforming baselines by up to 13.8% on Libero and matching specialized models in real-world tasks.
The paper provides a task-driven benchmark comparing visual, acoustic, magnetic, and resistive tactile sensors on three manipulation tasks and concludes that sensor utility depends on modality, material friction, and task specifics.
GTA-VLA conditions VLA models on user spatial priors to produce a unified spatial-visual chain-of-thought, reaching 81.2% success on SimplerEnv WidowX and improving performance under out-of-distribution shifts.
Anchor-Centric Adaptation escapes the diversity trap by prioritizing repeated demonstrations at core anchors over broad coverage, yielding higher success rates under fixed data budgets in robotic manipulation.
MolmoAct2 is an open VLA model that outperforms baselines like Pi-05 on 7 benchmarks and whose backbone surpasses GPT-5 on 13 embodied-reasoning tasks through new datasets, specialized training, and architecture changes for lower latency.
M²-VLA shows that generalized VLMs can serve as direct backbones for robotic manipulation by selectively extracting task-critical features via Mixture of Layers and adding Meta Skill Modules for efficient trajectory learning.
Vision-geometry backbones using pretrained 3D world models outperform vision-language and video models for robotic manipulation by enabling direct mapping from visual input to geometric actions.
A1 is a transparent VLA framework achieving state-of-the-art robot manipulation success with up to 72% lower latency via adaptive layer truncation and inter-layer flow matching.
ExpertGen generates high-success expert policies in simulation from imperfect priors by freezing a diffusion behavior model and optimizing its initial noise via RL, then distills them for real-robot deployment.
Robometer combines intra-trajectory progress supervision with inter-trajectory preference supervision on a 1M-trajectory dataset to learn more generalizable robotic reward functions than prior methods.
Pose-VLA uses a decoupled two-stage pre-training with discrete pose tokens to extract universal 3D spatial priors from 3D datasets and robotic trajectories, achieving 79.5% success on RoboTwin 2.0 and 96.0% on LIBERO.
VLANeXt distills 12 design insights from a unified VLA study into a model that outperforms prior methods on LIBERO benchmarks while releasing code for further exploration.
DreamZero uses a 14B video diffusion model as a World Action Model to achieve over 2x better zero-shot generalization on real robots than state-of-the-art VLAs, real-time 7Hz closed-loop control, and cross-embodiment transfer with 10-30 minutes of data.
Steerable VLAs trained on rich synthetic commands at subtask, motion, and pixel levels enable VLMs to steer robot behavior more effectively, outperforming prior hierarchical baselines on real-world manipulation and generalization tasks.
ABot-M0 unifies heterogeneous robot data into a 6-million-trajectory dataset and introduces Action Manifold Learning to predict stable actions on a low-dimensional manifold using a DiT backbone.
LifeLong-RFT applies chunking-level on-policy reinforcement learning with Quantized Action Consistency Reward, Continuous Trajectory Alignment Reward, and Format Compliance Reward to fine-tune VLA models, achieving a 22% average success rate gain over supervised fine-tuning on the LIBERO benchmark's
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