ST-$π$: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Chuanhao, Zhou, Hanyu, Peng, Shihan, Li, Yan, Gu, Tao, Yan, Luxin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ma, Chuanhao
Zhou, Hanyu
Peng, Shihan
Li, Yan
Gu, Tao
Yan, Luxin
author_facet Ma, Chuanhao
Zhou, Hanyu
Peng, Shihan
Li, Yan
Gu, Tao
Yan, Luxin
contents Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved great success on general robotic tasks, but still face challenges in fine-grained spatiotemporal manipulation. Typically, existing methods mainly embed spatiotemporal knowledge into visual and action representations, and directly perform a cross-modal mapping for step-level action prediction. However, such spatiotemporal reasoning remains largely implicit, making it difficult to handle multiple sequential behaviors with explicit spatiotemporal boundaries. In this work, we propose ST-$π$, a structured spatiotemporal VLA model for robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) Spatiotemporal VLM. We encode 4D observations and task instructions into latent spaces, and feed them into the LLM to generate a sequence of causally ordered chunk-level action prompts consisting of sub-tasks, spatial grounding and temporal grounding. 2) Spatiotemporal action expert. Conditioned on chunk-level action prompts, we design a structured dual-generator guidance to jointly model spatial dependencies and temporal causality, thus predicting step-level action parameters. Within this structured framework, the VLM explicitly plans global spatiotemporal behavior, and the action expert further refines local spatiotemporal control. In addition, we propose a real-world robotic dataset with structured spatiotemporal annotations for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Our code link: https://github.com/chuanhaoma/ST-pi.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17880
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ST-$π$: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation
Ma, Chuanhao
Zhou, Hanyu
Peng, Shihan
Li, Yan
Gu, Tao
Yan, Luxin
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved great success on general robotic tasks, but still face challenges in fine-grained spatiotemporal manipulation. Typically, existing methods mainly embed spatiotemporal knowledge into visual and action representations, and directly perform a cross-modal mapping for step-level action prediction. However, such spatiotemporal reasoning remains largely implicit, making it difficult to handle multiple sequential behaviors with explicit spatiotemporal boundaries. In this work, we propose ST-$π$, a structured spatiotemporal VLA model for robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) Spatiotemporal VLM. We encode 4D observations and task instructions into latent spaces, and feed them into the LLM to generate a sequence of causally ordered chunk-level action prompts consisting of sub-tasks, spatial grounding and temporal grounding. 2) Spatiotemporal action expert. Conditioned on chunk-level action prompts, we design a structured dual-generator guidance to jointly model spatial dependencies and temporal causality, thus predicting step-level action parameters. Within this structured framework, the VLM explicitly plans global spatiotemporal behavior, and the action expert further refines local spatiotemporal control. In addition, we propose a real-world robotic dataset with structured spatiotemporal annotations for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Our code link: https://github.com/chuanhaoma/ST-pi.
title ST-$π$: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17880