HiF-VLA: Hindsight, Insight and Foresight through Motion Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models
This addresses long-horizon coherence issues in robotic manipulation, offering a novel framework that enhances practical applications, though it builds incrementally on existing VLA methods.
The paper tackled the problem of temporal myopia in Vision-Language-Action models for robotic manipulation by introducing a motion-centric world model for bidirectional temporal reasoning, resulting in superior performance on benchmarks like LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D with negligible inference latency and substantial improvements in real-world tasks.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. From this perspective, HiF-VLA equips a motion-centric world model for the VLA, enabling agents to reason about temporal dynamics for future evolution during action generation. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a ''think-while-acting'' paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.