Xindong He

Yifei Wei, Linqing Zhong, Yi Liu et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation by grounding high-level semantic instructions into executable physical actions. However, prevailing approaches typically adopt a monolithic generation paradigm, directly mapping visual-linguistic features to high-frequency motor commands in a flat, non-hierarchical fashion. This strategy overlooks the inherent hierarchy of robotic manipulation, where complex actions can be naturally modeled in a Hybrid Action Space, decomposing into discrete macro-directional reaching and continuous micro-pose alignment, severely widening the semantic-actuation gap and imposing a heavy representational burden on grounding high-level semantics to continuous actions. To address this, we introduce Libra-VLA, a novel Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System VLA architecture. We explicitly decouple the learning complexity into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy to strike a training equilibrium, while simultaneously leveraging this structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy. The Semantic Planner predicts discrete action tokens capturing macro-directional intent, while the Action Refiner conditions on coarse intent to generate high-frequency continuous actions for precise alignment. Crucially, our empirical analysis reveals that performance follows an inverted-U curve relative to action decomposition granularity, peaking exactly when the learning difficulty is balanced between the two sub-systems. With the asynchronous design, our approach offers a scalable, robust, and responsive solution for open-world manipulation.

Yi Liu, Sukai Wang, Dafeng Wei et al.

General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve semantic generalization, insufficient embodied reasoning leads to brittle behavior, and conversely, strong reasoning alone is inadequate without precise control. To provide a decoupled and quantitative assessment of this bottleneck, we introduce Embodied Reasoning Intelligence Quotient (ERIQ), a large-scale embodied reasoning benchmark in robotic manipulation, comprising 6K+ question-answer pairs across four reasoning dimensions. By decoupling reasoning from execution, ERIQ enables systematic evaluation and reveals a strong positive correlation between embodied reasoning capability and end-to-end VLA generalization. To bridge the gap from reasoning to precise execution, we propose FACT, a flow-matching-based action tokenizer that converts continuous control into discrete sequences while preserving high-fidelity trajectory reconstruction. The resulting GenieReasoner jointly optimizes reasoning and action in a unified space, outperforming both continuous-action and prior discrete-action baselines in real-world tasks. Together, ERIQ and FACT provide a principled framework for diagnosing and overcoming the reasoning-precision trade-off, advancing robust, general-purpose robotic manipulation. Project page: https://geniereasoner.github.io/GenieReasoner/