Tiefu Cai

Pengteng Li, Weiyu Guo, He Zhang et al.

We introduce SOMA, the Spatial Memory framework for Out-of-Vision Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Most existing VLAs implicitly assume that task-relevant objects are always visible, leading to brittle and reactive behaviors when targets fall outside the camera's field of view. SOMA addresses this limitation by equipping VLAs with a persistent spatial memory constructed from multi-view observations acquired via a movable head camera, enabling reasoning beyond the current visual frustum. The framework consists of three components: Spatial Memory Construction, which aggregates angular-wise observations into a unified spatial-semantic representation through scanning; Dynamic Memory Refinement, which maintains global consistency over time; and Contextual Memory Retrieval, which activates instruction-relevant spatial cues during manipulation. We evaluate SOMA on five challenging real-world out-of-vision manipulation tasks, including multi-step and dual-arm scenarios where target objects are initially invisible. Experimental results show that SOMA not only improves task success rates, but also induces qualitatively different manipulation behaviors, with faster target localization, reduced viewpoint search, and near one-shot grasping under partial observability. Additional experiments on RoboCasa GR1 and SimplerEnv further validate the effectiveness of SOMA's memory design under conventional fully observable settings. Code will be released soon.

Weiyu Guo, He Zhang, Pengteng Li et al.

Recent advances in embodied intelligence have leveraged massive scaling of data and model parameters to master natural-language command following and multi-task control. In contrast, biological systems demonstrate an innate ability to acquire skills rapidly from sparse experience. Crucially, current robotic policies struggle to replicate the dynamic stability, reflexive responsiveness, and temporal memory inherent in biological motion. Here we present Neuromorphic Vision-Language-Action (NeuroVLA), a framework that mimics the structural organization of the bio-nervous system between the cortex, cerebellum, and spinal cord. We adopt a system-level bio-inspired design: a high-level model plans goals, an adaptive cerebellum module stabilizes motion using high-frequency sensors feedback, and a bio-inspired spinal layer executes lightning-fast actions generation. NeuroVLA represents the first deployment of a neuromorphic VLA on physical robotics, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We observe the emergence of biological motor characteristics without additional data or special guidance: it stops the shaking in robotic arms, saves significant energy(only 0.4w on Neuromorphic Processor), shows temporal memory ability and triggers safety reflexes in less than 20 milliseconds.