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Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

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abstract

A key limitation of learned robot control policies is their inability to generalize outside their training data. Recent works on vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown that the use of large, internet pre-trained vision-language models as the backbone of learned robot policies can substantially improve their robustness and generalization ability. Yet, one of the most exciting capabilities of large vision-language models in other domains is their ability to reason iteratively through complex problems. Can that same capability be brought into robotics to allow policies to improve performance by reasoning about a given task before acting? Naive use of "chain-of-thought" (CoT) style prompting is significantly less effective with standard VLAs because of the relatively simple training examples that are available to them. Additionally, purely semantic reasoning about sub-tasks, as is common in regular CoT, is insufficient for robot policies that need to ground their reasoning in sensory observations and the robot state. To this end, we introduce Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (ECoT) for VLAs, in which we train VLAs to perform multiple steps of reasoning about plans, sub-tasks, motions, and visually grounded features like object bounding boxes and end effector positions, before predicting the robot action. We design a scalable pipeline for generating synthetic training data for ECoT on large robot datasets. We demonstrate, that ECoT increases the absolute success rate of OpenVLA, the current strongest open-source VLA policy, by 28% across challenging generalization tasks, without any additional robot training data. Additionally, ECoT makes it easier for humans to interpret a policy's failures and correct its behavior using natural language.

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CoRAL: Contact-Rich Adaptive LLM-based Control for Robotic Manipulation

cs.RO · 2026-05-04 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

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.

UAM: A Dual-Stream Perspective on Forgetting in VLA Training

cs.CV · 2026-05-15 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

UAM adds a Dorsal Expert initialized from a generative model and trained on visual dynamics prediction to preserve over 95% of VLM multimodal ability in VLA training while achieving top success rates on manipulation tasks including OOD cases.

MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment

cs.RO · 2026-05-04 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

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.

GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation

cs.RO · 2026-04-24 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

GazeVLA pretrains on large human egocentric datasets to capture gaze-based intention, then finetunes on limited robot data with chain-of-thought reasoning to achieve better robotic manipulation performance than baselines.

SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning

cs.RO · 2025-09-11 · conditional · novelty 6.0

SimpleVLA-RL applies tailored reinforcement learning to VLA models, reaching SoTA on LIBERO, outperforming π₀ on RoboTwin, and surpassing SFT in real-world tasks while reducing data needs and identifying a 'pushcut' phenomenon.

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