Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to map multimodal inputs to robot actions. However, most existing approaches struggle to cover complex dynamic scenarios due to treating all visual tokens uniformly and reasoning with human-selected factors, which lack mechanisms to emphasize task-critical evidence and ignore underlying factors. To address this issue, we propose LEEVLA, a VLA architecture for seeing what matters in Latent Environment Evolution that explicitly guides the model toward informative regions while preserving the structured evolution of latent world representations. To identify salient and instruction-relevant regions, we introduce drift-guided dynamic prioritization (DGDP), which combines dynamic position prioritization (DPP) with semantic drift guidance (SDG) to guide the VLA agent where to attend during training. On top of this, we introduce structured feature flow generation (SFFG), which models how these prioritized features should evolve in latent space via prototype-to-periphery (P2P) prediction, and a mutual-neighborhood contrastive (MC) loss to maintain topological consistency among neighborhoods. Together, DGDP and SFFG form a task-aware"where-how"training framework. Extensive experiments on VLA benchmarks show that LEEVLA consistently outperforms prior methods, confirming that explicit task-evidence guidance and structured latent reasoning are both crucial for scalable VLA. Our code is available at https://github.com/LyuQi127/LEEVLA.
Qi Lyu, Baicheng Liu, Xudong Wang et al.· 0 citations
Existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents typically cannot infer users' implicit intentions. They are unable to leverage past experiences in persistent environments. In this article, we propose ReasonWalker, a novel navigation model designed to enable reasoning-based navigation using implicit instructions over time. To ensure persistent and efficient operation, ReasonWalker constructs and stores explicit scene maps, allowing it to learn scene associations for improved renavigation in subsequent episodes. To facilitate comprehension and reasoning over implicit instructions, ReasonWalker leverages a large language model (LLM) to jointly process user instructions, agent observations, and scene maps, generating semantic navigation tokens that guide action prediction. To train ReasonWalker, we propose a new hierarchical learning paradigm, where the model first learns navigation actions and then acquires scene associations for implicit instruction reasoning. Additionally, we provide a new implicit instruction benchmark to support training and evaluation of reasoning-based navigation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed ReasonWalker. The project page with video presentations and code is at: https://wangxudongsia.github.io/ReasonWalker-Web/.
Xudong Wang, Baicheng Liu, Jiahua Dong et al.· IEEE Transactions on Cyberne...· 0 citations