Xian Nie

Xiaosong Jia, Bowen Yang, Zuhao Ge et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn task-relevant features. However, without explicit guidance, these models often overfit to spurious correlations, such as visual shortcuts or environmental noise, limiting their generalization. In this paper, we introduce GuidedVLA, a framework designed to manually guide the action generation to focus on task-relevant factors. Our core insight is to treat the action decoder not as a monolithic learner, but as an assembly of functional components. Individual attention heads are supervised by manually defined auxiliary signals to capture distinct factors. As an initial study, we instantiate this paradigm with three specialized heads: object grounding, spatial geometry, and temporal skill logic. Across simulation and real-robot experiments, GuidedVLA improves success rates in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings compared to strong VLA baselines. Finally, we show that the quality of these specialized factors correlates positively with task performance and that our mechanism yields decoupled, high-quality features. Our results suggest that explicitly guiding action-decoder learning is a promising direction for building more robust and general VLA models.

Mingyu Zhang, Lifeng Zhuo, Tianxi Tan et al.

Humans learn by observing, interacting with environments, and internalizing physics and causality. Here, we aim to ask whether an agent can similarly acquire human-like reasoning from interaction and keep improving with more experience. We study this in a Game-to-Unseen (G2U) setting, curating 1,000+ heterogeneous games with diverse physical and causal mechanisms, and evaluate at three human-like levels: Survival, Curiosity, Utility, from primitive intuition to goal-driven reasoning. Our analysis reveals complementary failures: VLM/VLA agents reason but lack look-ahead in interactive settings, while world models imagine but imitate visual patterns rather than analyze physics and causality. We therefore propose IPR (Interactive Physical Reasoner), using world-model rollouts to score and reinforce a VLM's policy, and introduce PhysCode, a physics-centric action code aligning semantic intent with dynamics to provide a shared action space for prediction and reasoning. Pretrained on 1,000+ games, our IPR performs robustly on three levels, matches GPT-5 overall, and surpasses it on Curiosity. We find that performance improves with more training games and interaction steps, and that the model also zero-shot transfers to unseen games. These results support physics-centric interaction as a path to steadily improving physical reasoning.