VLA-4D: Embedding 4D Awareness into Vision-Language-Action Models for SpatioTemporally Coherent Robotic Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Hanyu, Ma, Chuanhao, Lee, Gim Hee
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Hanyu
Ma, Chuanhao
Lee, Gim Hee
author_facet Zhou, Hanyu
Ma, Chuanhao
Lee, Gim Hee
contents Vision-language-action (VLA) models show potential for general robotic tasks, but remain challenging in spatiotemporally coherent manipulation, which requires fine-grained representations. Typically, existing methods embed 3D positions into visual representations to enhance the spatial precision of actions. However, these methods struggle to achieve temporally coherent control over action execution. In this work, we propose VLA-4D, a general VLA model with 4D awareness for spatiotemporally coherent robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) 4D-aware visual representation. We extract visual features, embed 1D time into 3D positions for 4D embeddings, and fuse them into a unified visual representation via a cross-attention mechanism. 2) Spatiotemporal action representation. We extend conventional spatial action representations with temporal information to enable the spatiotemporal planning, and align the multimodal representations into the LLM for spatiotemporal action prediction. Within this unified framework, the designed visual and action representations jointly make robotic manipulation spatially-smooth and temporally-coherent. In addition, we extend the VLA dataset with temporal action annotations for fine-tuning our model. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the superiority of our method across different tasks of robotic manipulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLA-4D: Embedding 4D Awareness into Vision-Language-Action Models for SpatioTemporally Coherent Robotic Manipulation
Zhou, Hanyu
Ma, Chuanhao
Lee, Gim Hee
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language-action (VLA) models show potential for general robotic tasks, but remain challenging in spatiotemporally coherent manipulation, which requires fine-grained representations. Typically, existing methods embed 3D positions into visual representations to enhance the spatial precision of actions. However, these methods struggle to achieve temporally coherent control over action execution. In this work, we propose VLA-4D, a general VLA model with 4D awareness for spatiotemporally coherent robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) 4D-aware visual representation. We extract visual features, embed 1D time into 3D positions for 4D embeddings, and fuse them into a unified visual representation via a cross-attention mechanism. 2) Spatiotemporal action representation. We extend conventional spatial action representations with temporal information to enable the spatiotemporal planning, and align the multimodal representations into the LLM for spatiotemporal action prediction. Within this unified framework, the designed visual and action representations jointly make robotic manipulation spatially-smooth and temporally-coherent. In addition, we extend the VLA dataset with temporal action annotations for fine-tuning our model. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the superiority of our method across different tasks of robotic manipulation.
title VLA-4D: Embedding 4D Awareness into Vision-Language-Action Models for SpatioTemporally Coherent Robotic Manipulation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17199