FlowHijack is the first dynamics-aware backdoor attack on flow-matching VLAs that achieves high success rates with stealthy triggers while preserving benign performance and making malicious actions kinematically indistinguishable from normal ones.
hub Canonical reference
A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI
Canonical reference. 95% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
71
Pith papers citing it
Background
95% of classified citations
abstract
Embodied AI is widely recognized as a cornerstone of artificial general intelligence (AGI) because it involves controlling embodied agents to perform tasks in the physical world. Building on the success of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), a new category of multimodal models -- referred to as vision-language-action (VLA) models -- has emerged to address language-conditioned robotic tasks in embodied AI by leveraging their distinct ability to generate actions. The recent proliferation of VLAs necessitates a comprehensive survey to capture the rapidly evolving landscape. To this end, we present the first survey on VLAs for embodied AI. This work provides a detailed taxonomy of VLAs, organized into three major lines of research. The first line focuses on individual components of VLAs. The second line is dedicated to developing VLA-based control policies adept at predicting low-level actions. The third line comprises high-level task planners capable of decomposing long-horizon tasks into a sequence of subtasks, thereby guiding VLAs to follow more general user instructions. Furthermore, we provide an extensive summary of relevant resources, including datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the challenges facing VLAs and outline promising future directions in embodied AI. A curated repository associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/yueen-ma/Awesome-VLA.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 20
citation-polarity summary
roles
background 20representative citing papers
VLA models from VLM adaptation can be pruned 12-30% via multi-module joint scheme based on divergence signals while keeping ~90% performance on LIBERO without post-pruning recovery, unlike standard criteria that collapse.
LIBERO-Safety supplies a scalable benchmark, data-generation pipeline, and 19,664-demonstration dataset that exposes a generalization-safety tension in current VLA models where diverse training improves collision avoidance but task success stays limited by trajectory quality and semantic understandi
VLA models exhibit catastrophic forgetting on a new real-world dataset of four sequential manipulation tasks, with experience replay implementation factors evaluated for mitigation.
4DLidarOpen is a new open dataset providing synchronized 4D FMCW Lidar velocity measurements, multi-Lidar and camera data, and 3D bounding-box annotations with track IDs to support benchmarks on 3D detection, BEV segmentation, flow prediction, and motion forecasting.
RotVLA models latent actions as continuous SO(n) rotations with triplet-frame supervision and flow-matching to reach 98.2% success on LIBERO and 89.6%/88.5% on RoboTwin2.0 using a 1.7B-parameter model.
A3 reframes dynamic action chunk commitment in VLA models as self-speculative prefix verification, accepting the longest continuous sequence of actions that satisfies consensus-ordered conditional invariance and prefix-closed sequential consistency.
Pace-and-Path Correction decomposes a quadratic cost minimization into orthogonal pace and path channels to correct chunked actions in VLA models, raising success rates by up to 28.8% in dynamic settings.
GuardVLA embeds a stealthy backdoor watermark in VLAs via secret messages in visual data and uses a swap-and-detect mechanism for post-release ownership verification that preserves task performance.
ECHO organizes VLA experiences into a hierarchical memory tree in hyperbolic space via autoencoder and entailment constraints, delivering a 12.8% success-rate gain on LIBERO-Long over the pi0 baseline.
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.
ATI is a tripartite bio-inspired architecture for physical AI that co-designs sensing and inference, shown in a camera prototype to raise accuracy from 53.8% to 88% and cut remote invocations by 43.3%.
DeformPIC deforms query point clouds under prompt guidance for in-context learning, outperforming prior methods with lower Chamfer Distance on reconstruction, denoising, and registration tasks.
HeiSD delivers up to 2.45x faster inference for embodied VLA models by hybridizing speculative decoding with kinematic boundary detection and error-mitigation tricks while preserving task success rates.
KERV integrates kinematic Kalman Filter predictions with speculative decoding in VLA models to achieve 27-37% faster inference while maintaining nearly the same task success rates.
RL-VLA³ is an asynchronous RL framework for VLA training that delivers up to 85.2% higher throughput than synchronous baselines while preserving identical sample efficiency and scaling to 256 GPUs.
TAP uses two-stage pretraining on unlabeled data to learn physical competence before language grounding, matching 1M-expert models with far less labeled data and showing robustness on real robots.
VLA-Corrector adds a detect-and-correct inference layer using a latent vision monitor and online gradient guidance to enable adaptive action horizons in chunked VLA policies.
StaKe adds lightweight auxiliary heads for manipulation stage identification and next-gripper-transition keyframe prediction to VLA fine-tuning, reporting relative success rate gains of 14% in bimanual simulation and 56% on single-arm real-robot tasks.
UniFS achieves 98.3% success on LIBERO with 2.1x lower latency than prior fast-slow VLA models by stratifying VLM layer update frequencies, inverting latent interactions, and applying multi-level supervision.
PolicyTrim is an RL post-training framework that boosts VLA policy efficiency by 3x chunk utilization and 51.4% fewer steps, yielding up to 5.83x speedup.
Vesta is a unified embodied generalist model that outperforms specialist baselines by over 20% on average and improves real-world robotic task success by over 35%.
A systematic study of hierarchical VLA agents identifies design principles that improve robot manipulation performance over flat and naive hierarchical baselines in simulation and real-world experiments.
SceneDiver introduces a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation approach for VLMs that constructs holistic scene graphs then iteratively decomposes tasks, plus a distillation adapter for VLAs, to reduce visual hallucinations in embodied AI benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
-
FlowHijack: A Dynamics-Aware Backdoor Attack on Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Models
FlowHijack is the first dynamics-aware backdoor attack on flow-matching VLAs that achieves high success rates with stealthy triggers while preserving benign performance and making malicious actions kinematically indistinguishable from normal ones.
-
Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models
A3 reframes dynamic action chunk commitment in VLA models as self-speculative prefix verification, accepting the longest continuous sequence of actions that satisfies consensus-ordered conditional invariance and prefix-closed sequential consistency.
-
Deformation-based In-Context Learning for Point Cloud Understanding
DeformPIC deforms query point clouds under prompt guidance for in-context learning, outperforming prior methods with lower Chamfer Distance on reconstruction, denoising, and registration tasks.
-
PolicyTrim: Boosting Intrinsic Policy Efficiency of Vision-Language-Action Models
PolicyTrim is an RL post-training framework that boosts VLA policy efficiency by 3x chunk utilization and 51.4% fewer steps, yielding up to 5.83x speedup.
-
Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation
SceneDiver introduces a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation approach for VLMs that constructs holistic scene graphs then iteratively decomposes tasks, plus a distillation adapter for VLAs, to reduce visual hallucinations in embodied AI benchmarks.
-
VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models
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.
-
ActDistill: General Action-Guided Self-Derived Distillation for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models
ActDistill transfers action knowledge from heavy VLA teacher models to lightweight students via graph-encapsulated hierarchies and action-guided dynamic routing, delivering over 50% computation reduction and 1.67x speedup with comparable or better performance on embodied tasks.
-
Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations
Video Prediction Policy conditions robot action learning on future-frame predictions inside fine-tuned video diffusion models, yielding 18.6% relative gains on Calvin ABC-D and 31.6% higher real-world success rates.
-
Rethinking Video-Language Model from the Language Input Perspective
Introduces a plug-and-play framework that generates varied texts and uses attribute reasoning plus video-guided loss to improve state-of-the-art Video-Language Models.
-
Sword: Style-Robust World Models as Simulators via Dynamic Latent Bootstrapping for VLA Policy Post-Training
Sword improves world model simulators for VLA policies by disentangling visual style from dynamics and bootstrapping latents for better consistency, outperforming baselines on LIBERO in generalization and RL post-training success.
-
Pre-VLA: Preemptive Runtime Verification for Reliable Vision-Language-Action and World-Model Rollouts
Pre-VLA is a multimodal runtime verifier that predicts safety confidence and advantage scores for action chunks, raising closed-loop success rates on the LIBERO benchmark from 30.79% to 37.62%.
- E-VLA: Event-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Dark and Blurred Scenes
- LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorization