Daily Papers

The pursuit of robot generalists - instructable agents capable of performing diverse tasks across diverse environments - demands rigorous and scalable evaluation. Yet real-world testing of robot policies remains fundamentally constrained: it is labor-intensive, slow, unsafe at scale, and difficult to reproduce. Existing simulation benchmarks are similarly limited, as they train and test policies within the same synthetic domains and cannot assess models trained from real-world demonstrations or alternative simulation environments. As policies expand in scope and complexity, these barriers only intensify, since defining "success" in robotics often hinges on nuanced human judgments of execution quality. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmarking framework that overcomes these challenges by shifting VLA evaluation into large-scale simulated environments augmented with online human feedback. Leveraging advances in vision-language models, 2D-to-3D generative modeling, and differentiable rendering, our approach automatically converts video demonstrations from widely used robot datasets into simulated counterparts. Within these digital twins, we assess VLA policies using both automated VLM-guided scoring and scalable human preference judgments collected from crowdworkers, transforming human involvement from tedious scene setup, resetting, and safety supervision into lightweight preference comparisons. To measure robustness, we systematically perturb simulated environments along multiple axes, such as textures and object placements, stress-testing policy generalization under controlled variation. The result is a continuously evolving, reproducible, and scalable benchmark for real-world trained robot manipulation policies, addressing a critical missing capability in today's robotics landscape.

This paper introduces CognitiveDrone, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model tailored for complex Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) tasks that demand advanced cognitive abilities. Trained on a dataset comprising over 8,000 simulated flight trajectories across three key categories-Human Recognition, Symbol Understanding, and Reasoning-the model generates real-time 4D action commands based on first-person visual inputs and textual instructions. To further enhance performance in intricate scenarios, we propose CognitiveDrone-R1, which integrates an additional Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning module to simplify task directives prior to high-frequency control. Experimental evaluations using our open-source benchmark, CognitiveDroneBench, reveal that while a racing-oriented model (RaceVLA) achieves an overall success rate of 31.3%, the base CognitiveDrone model reaches 59.6%, and CognitiveDrone-R1 attains a success rate of 77.2%. These results demonstrate improvements of up to 30% in critical cognitive tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities into UAV control systems. Our contributions include the development of a state-of-the-art VLA model for UAV control and the introduction of the first dedicated benchmark for assessing cognitive tasks in drone operations. The complete repository is available at cognitivedrone.github.io

The rise of foundation models paves the way for generalist robot policies in the physical world. Existing methods relying on text-only instructions often struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. We argue that interleaved image-text inputs offer richer and less biased context and enable robots to better handle unseen tasks with more versatile human-robot interaction. Building on this insight, Interleave-VLA, the first robot learning paradigm capable of comprehending interleaved image-text instructions and directly generating continuous action sequences in the physical world, is introduced. It offers a natural, flexible, and model-agnostic paradigm that extends state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) models with minimal modifications while achieving strong zero-shot generalization. Interleave-VLA also includes an automatic pipeline that converts text instructions from Open X-Embodiment into interleaved image-text instructions, resulting in a large-scale real-world interleaved embodied dataset with 210k episodes. Comprehensive evaluation in simulation and the real world shows that Interleave-VLA offers two major benefits: (1) improves out-of-domain generalization to unseen objects by 2x compared to text input baselines, (2) supports flexible task interfaces and diverse instructions in a zero-shot manner, such as hand-drawn sketches. We attribute Interleave-VLA's strong zero-shot capability to the use of instruction images, which effectively mitigate hallucinations, and the inclusion of heterogeneous multimodal datasets, enriched with Internet-sourced images, offering potential for scalability. More information is available at https://interleave-vla.github.io/Interleave-VLA-Anonymous/

The important manifestation of robot intelligence is the ability to naturally interact and autonomously make decisions. Traditional approaches to robot control often compartmentalize perception, planning, and decision-making, simplifying system design but limiting the synergy between different information streams. This compartmentalization poses challenges in achieving seamless autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and action execution. To address these limitations, a novel paradigm, named Vision-Language-Action tasks for QUAdruped Robots (QUAR-VLA), has been introduced in this paper. This approach tightly integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions, effectively merging perception, planning, and decision-making. The central idea is to elevate the overall intelligence of the robot. Within this framework, a notable challenge lies in aligning fine-grained instructions with visual perception information. This emphasizes the complexity involved in ensuring that the robot accurately interprets and acts upon detailed instructions in harmony with its visual observations. Consequently, we propose QUAdruped Robotic Transformer (QUART), a family of VLA models to integrate visual information and instructions from diverse modalities as input and generates executable actions for real-world robots and present QUAdruped Robot Dataset (QUARD), a large-scale multi-task dataset including navigation, complex terrain locomotion, and whole-body manipulation tasks for training QUART models. Our extensive evaluation (4000 evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables QUART to obtain a range of emergent capabilities.

We introduce OG-VLA, a novel architecture and learning framework that combines the generalization strengths of Vision Language Action models (VLAs) with the robustness of 3D-aware policies. We address the challenge of mapping natural language instructions and multi-view RGBD observations to quasi-static robot actions. 3D-aware robot policies achieve state-of-the-art performance on precise robot manipulation tasks, but struggle with generalization to unseen instructions, scenes, and objects. On the other hand, VLAs excel at generalizing across instructions and scenes, but can be sensitive to camera and robot pose variations. We leverage prior knowledge embedded in language and vision foundation models to improve generalization of 3D-aware keyframe policies. OG-VLA projects input observations from diverse views into a point cloud which is then rendered from canonical orthographic views, ensuring input view invariance and consistency between input and output spaces. These canonical views are processed with a vision backbone, a Large Language Model (LLM), and an image diffusion model to generate images that encode the next position and orientation of the end-effector on the input scene. Evaluations on the Arnold and Colosseum benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generalization to unseen environments, with over 40% relative improvements while maintaining robust performance in seen settings. We also show real-world adaption in 3 to 5 demonstrations along with strong generalization. Videos and resources at https://og-vla.github.io/

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a major challenge for general-purpose robots. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show potential in learning skills from demonstrations, their scalability is limited by scarce high-quality training data. Existing data collection methods face inherent constraints: manual teleoperation overloads human operators, while automated planning often produces unnatural motions. We propose a Shared Autonomy framework that divides control between macro and micro motions. A human operator guides the robot's arm pose through intuitive VR teleoperation, while an autonomous DexGrasp-VLA policy handles fine-grained hand control using real-time tactile and visual feedback. This division significantly reduces cognitive load and enables efficient collection of high-quality coordinated arm-hand demonstrations. Using this data, we train an end-to-end VLA policy enhanced with our novel Arm-Hand Feature Enhancement module, which captures both distinct and shared representations of macro and micro movements for more natural coordination. Our Corrective Teleoperation system enables continuous policy improvement through human-in-the-loop failure recovery. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-quality data with minimal manpower and achieves a 90% success rate across diverse objects, including unseen instances. Comprehensive evaluations validate the system's effectiveness in developing dexterous manipulation capabilities.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to unify perception, language understanding, and action generation, offering strong cross-task and cross-scene generalization with broad impact on embodied AI. However, current VLA models often lack explicit step-by-step reasoning, instead emitting final actions without considering affordance constraints or geometric relations. Their post-training pipelines also rarely reinforce reasoning quality, relying primarily on supervised fine-tuning with weak reward design. To address these challenges, we present VLA-R1, a reasoning-enhanced VLA that integrates Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to systematically optimize both reasoning and execution. Specifically, we design an RLVR-based post-training strategy with verifiable rewards for region alignment, trajectory consistency, and output formatting, thereby strengthening reasoning robustness and execution accuracy. Moreover, we develop VLA-CoT-13K, a high-quality dataset that provides chain-of-thought supervision explicitly aligned with affordance and trajectory annotations. Furthermore, extensive evaluations on in-domain, out-of-domain, simulation, and real-robot platforms demonstrate that VLA-R1 achieves superior generalization and real-world performance compared to prior VLA methods. We plan to release the model, code, and dataset following the publication of this work. Code: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/VLA-R1. Website: https://gigaai-research.github.io/VLA-R1.

Testing on real machines is indispensable for robotic control algorithms. In the context of learning-based algorithms, especially VLA models, demand for large-scale evaluation, i.e. testing a large number of models on a large number of tasks, is becoming increasingly urgent. However, doing this right is highly non-trivial, especially when scalability and reproducibility is taken into account. In this report, we describe our methodology for constructing RoboChallenge, an online evaluation system to test robotic control algorithms, and our survey of recent state-of-the-art VLA models using our initial benchmark Table30.

LIBERO has emerged as a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models; however, its current training and evaluation settings are problematic, often leading to inflated performance estimates and preventing fair model comparison. To address these issues, we introduce LIBERO-PRO, an extended LIBERO benchmark that systematically evaluates model performance under reasonable perturbations across four dimensions: manipulated objects, initial states, task instructions, and environments. Experimental results reveal that, although existing models achieve over 90% accuracy under the standard LIBERO evaluation, their performance collapses to 0.0% under our generalized setting. Crucially, this discrepancy exposes the models' reliance on rote memorization of action sequences and environment layouts from the training set, rather than genuine task understanding or environmental perception. For instance, models persist in executing grasping actions when the target object is replaced with irrelevant items, and their outputs remain unchanged even when given corrupted instructions or even messy tokens. These findings expose the severe flaws in current evaluation practices, and we call on the community to abandon misleading methodologies in favor of robust assessments of model generalization and comprehension. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zxy-MLlab/LIBERO-PRO.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong decision-making capabilities in autonomous driving. However, existing VLAs often struggle with achieving efficient inference and generalizing to novel autonomous vehicle configurations and driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose Reasoning-VLA, a general and fast action-generation VLA framework. The proposed model employs a set of learnable action queries, initialized via Gaussian sampling from ground-truth trajectories within the training corpus. These learnable queries interact with reasoning-enhanced vision-language features to generate continuous action trajectories in parallel. To promote robust generalization, we consolidate eight publicly available autonomous driving datasets into a standardized, Chain-of-Thought reasoning-based, and easy-to-use data format for model training. Leveraging both supervised learning and reinforcement learning fine-tuning, extensive empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Reasoning-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, superior generalization capability, and the excellent inference speed reported to date.

We introduce iFlyBot-VLA, a large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model trained under a novel framework. The main contributions are listed as follows: (1) a latent action model thoroughly trained on large-scale human and robotic manipulation videos; (2) a dual-level action representation framework that jointly supervises both the Vision-Language Model (VLM) and the action expert during training; (3) a mixed training strategy that combines robot trajectory data with general QA and spatial QA datasets, effectively enhancing the 3D perceptual and reasoning capabilities of the VLM backbone. Specifically, the VLM is trained to predict two complementary forms of actions: latent actions, derived from our latent action model pretrained on cross-embodiment manipulation data, which capture implicit high-level intentions; and structured discrete action tokens, obtained through frequency-domain transformations of continuous control signals, which encode explicit low-level dynamics. This dual supervision aligns the representation spaces of language, vision, and action, enabling the VLM to directly contribute to action generation. Experimental results on the LIBERO Franka benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our frame-work, while real-world evaluations further show that iFlyBot-VLA achieves competitive success rates across diverse and challenging manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we plan to open-source a portion of our self-constructed dataset to support future research in the community

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models adapt large vision-language backbones to map images and instructions to robot actions. However, prevailing VLA decoders either generate actions autoregressively in a fixed left-to-right order or attach continuous diffusion or flow matching heads outside the backbone, demanding specialized training and iterative sampling that hinder a unified, scalable architecture. We present Discrete Diffusion VLA, a single-transformer policy that models discretized action chunks with discrete diffusion and is trained with the same cross-entropy objective as the VLM backbone. The design retains diffusion's progressive refinement paradigm while remaining natively compatible with the discrete token interface of VLMs. Our method achieves an adaptive decoding order that resolves easy action elements before harder ones and uses secondary remasking to revisit uncertain predictions across refinement rounds, which improves consistency and enables robust error correction. This unified decoder preserves pretrained vision language priors, supports parallel decoding, breaks the autoregressive bottleneck, and reduces the number of function evaluations. Discrete Diffusion VLA achieves 96.3% avg. SR on LIBERO, 71.2% visual matching on SimplerEnv Fractal and 49.3% overall on SimplerEnv Bridge, improving over both autoregressive and continuous diffusion baselines. These findings indicate that discrete-diffusion action decoder supports precise action modeling and consistent training, laying groundwork for scaling VLA to larger models and datasets.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to understand natural language instructions and visual observations and to execute corresponding actions as an embodied agent. Recent work integrates future images into the understanding-acting loop, yielding unified VLAs that jointly understand, generate, and act -- reading text and images and producing future images and actions. However, these models either rely on external experts for modality unification or treat image generation and action prediction as separate processes, limiting the benefits of direct synergy between these tasks. Our core philosophy is to optimize generation and action jointly through a synchronous denoising process, where the iterative refinement enables actions to evolve from initialization, under constant and sufficient visual guidance. We ground this philosophy in our proposed Unified Diffusion VLA and Joint Discrete Denoising Diffusion Process (JD3P), which is a joint diffusion process that integrates multiple modalities into a single denoising trajectory to serve as the key mechanism enabling understanding, generation, and acting to be intrinsically synergistic. Our model and theory are built on a unified tokenized space of all modalities and a hybrid attention mechanism. We further propose a two-stage training pipeline and several inference-time techniques that optimize performance and efficiency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as CALVIN, LIBERO, and SimplerEnv with 4times faster inference than autoregressive methods, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through in-depth analysis and real-world evaluations. Our project page is available at https://irpn-eai.github.io/UD-VLA.github.io/.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled instruction-conditioned robotic systems with improved generalization. However, most existing work focuses on reactive System 1 policies, underutilizing VLMs' strengths in semantic reasoning and long-horizon planning. These System 2 capabilities-characterized by deliberative, goal-directed thinking-remain under explored due to the limited temporal scale and structural complexity of current benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce RoboCerebra, a benchmark for evaluating high-level reasoning in long-horizon robotic manipulation. RoboCerebra includes: (1) a large-scale simulation dataset with extended task horizons and diverse subtask sequences in household environments; (2) a hierarchical framework combining a high-level VLM planner with a low-level vision-language-action (VLA) controller; and (3) an evaluation protocol targeting planning, reflection, and memory through structured System 1-System 2 interaction. The dataset is constructed via a top-down pipeline, where GPT generates task instructions and decomposes them into subtask sequences. Human operators execute the subtasks in simulation, yielding high-quality trajectories with dynamic object variations. Compared to prior benchmarks, RoboCerebra features significantly longer action sequences and denser annotations. We further benchmark state-of-the-art VLMs as System 2 modules and analyze their performance across key cognitive dimensions, advancing the development of more capable and generalizable robotic planners.

We present Galaxea Open-World Dataset, a large-scale, diverse collection of robot behaviors recorded in authentic human living and working environments. All demonstrations are gathered using a consistent robotic embodiment, paired with precise subtask-level language annotations to facilitate both training and evaluation. Building on this dataset, we introduce G0, a dual-system framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for multimodal planning with a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for fine-grained execution. G0 is trained using a three-stage curriculum: cross-embodiment pre-training, single-embodiment pre-training, and task-specific post-training. A comprehensive benchmark spanning tabletop manipulation, few-shot learning, and long-horizon mobile manipulation, demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we find that the single-embodiment pre-training stage, together with the Galaxea Open-World Dataset, plays a critical role in achieving strong performance.

Dual-system VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architectures have become a hot topic in embodied intelligence research, but there is a lack of sufficient open-source work for further performance analysis and optimization. To address this problem, this paper will summarize and compare the structural designs of existing dual-system architectures, and conduct systematic empirical evaluations on the core design elements of existing dual-system architectures. Ultimately, it will provide a low-cost open-source model for further exploration. Of course, this project will continue to update with more experimental conclusions and open-source models with improved performance for everyone to choose from. Project page: https://openhelix-robot.github.io/.

Grounding natural-language instructions into continuous control for quadruped robots remains a fundamental challenge in vision language action. Existing methods struggle to bridge high-level semantic reasoning and low-level actuation, leading to unstable grounding and weak generalization in the real world. To address these issues, we present MobileVLA-R1, a unified vision-language-action framework that enables explicit reasoning and continuous control for quadruped robots. We construct MobileVLA-CoT, a large-scale dataset of multi-granularity chain-of-thought (CoT) for embodied trajectories, providing structured reasoning supervision for alignment. Built upon this foundation, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm that combines supervised CoT alignment with GRPO reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning consistency, control stability, and long-horizon execution. Extensive evaluations on VLN and VLA tasks demonstrate superior performance over strong baselines, with approximately a 5% improvement. Real-world deployment on a quadruped robot validates robust performance in complex environments. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MobileVLA-R1. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MobileVLA-R1.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for developing general-purpose robotic systems, demonstrating the ability to combine visual understanding, language comprehension, and action generation. However, systematic evaluation of these models across diverse robotic tasks remains limited. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark suite for assessing VLA models. We profile three state-of-the-art VLM and VLAs - GPT-4o, OpenVLA, and JAT - across 20 diverse datasets from the Open-X-Embodiment collection, evaluating their performance on various manipulation tasks. Our analysis reveals several key insights: 1. current VLA models show significant variation in performance across different tasks and robot platforms, with GPT-4o demonstrating the most consistent performance through sophisticated prompt engineering, 2. all models struggle with complex manipulation tasks requiring multi-step planning, and 3. model performance is notably sensitive to action space characteristics and environmental factors. We release our evaluation framework and findings to facilitate systematic assessment of future VLA models and identify critical areas for improvement in the development of general purpose robotic systems.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising framework for enabling generalist robots capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting in the real world. These models usually build upon pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which excel at semantic understanding due to large-scale text pretraining. However, VLMs typically lack precise spatial understanding capabilities, as they are primarily tuned on 2D image-text pairs without 3D supervision. To address this limitation, recent approaches have incorporated explicit 3D inputs such as point clouds or depth maps, but this necessitates additional depth sensors or defective estimation. In contrast, our work introduces a plug-and-play module that implicitly injects 3D geometry features into VLA models by leveraging an off-the-shelf visual geometry foundation models. We design five spatially challenging tasks that require precise spatial understanding ability to validate effectiveness of our method. Extensive evaluations show that our method significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art VLA models across diverse scenarios.

Robust perception and dynamics modeling are fundamental to real-world robotic policy learning. Recent methods employ video diffusion models (VDMs) to enhance robotic policies, improving their understanding and modeling of the physical world. However, existing approaches overlook the coherent and physically consistent motion representations inherently encoded across frames in VDMs. To this end, we propose Video2Act, a framework that efficiently guides robotic action learning by explicitly integrating spatial and motion-aware representations. Building on the inherent representations of VDMs, we extract foreground boundaries and inter-frame motion variations while filtering out background noise and task-irrelevant biases. These refined representations are then used as additional conditioning inputs to a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head, enabling it to reason about what to manipulate and how to move. To mitigate inference inefficiency, we propose an asynchronous dual-system design, where the VDM functions as the slow System 2 and the DiT head as the fast System 1, working collaboratively to generate adaptive actions. By providing motion-aware conditions to System 1, Video2Act maintains stable manipulation even with low-frequency updates from the VDM. For evaluation, Video2Act surpasses previous state-of-the-art VLA methods by 7.7% in simulation and 21.7% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, further exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/open-mla

Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models despite recent progress in zero-shot generalization and simulation-to-real-world transfer. Current VLA models suffer from stage hallucination, where agents exploit coarse evaluation signals to shortcut multi-step tasks, reporting high progress without truly completing them. We present EvoVLA, a self-supervised VLA framework that addresses this issue through three complementary components: Stage-Aligned Reward (SAR), which uses triplet contrastive learning with Gemini-generated hard negatives to prevent visual shortcuts; Pose-Based Object Exploration (POE), which grounds curiosity in relative object-gripper pose instead of raw pixels; and Long-Horizon Memory, which uses selective context retention and gated fusion to stabilize intrinsic shaping during extended rollouts. Extensive evaluations on Discoverse-L, a long-horizon manipulation benchmark with three multi-stage tasks, show that EvoVLA improves average task success by 10.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline (OpenVLA-OFT), reaching 69.2 percent. EvoVLA also achieves one-and-a-half times better sample efficiency and reduces stage hallucination from 38.5 percent to 14.8 percent. Real-world deployment on physical robots reaches an average success rate of 54.6 percent across four manipulation tasks, outperforming OpenVLA-OFT by 11 points, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer and strong generalization. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EvoVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EvoVLA.

Inherently, robotic manipulation tasks are history-dependent: leveraging past context could be beneficial. However, most existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have been designed without considering this aspect, i.e., they rely solely on the current observation, ignoring preceding context. In this paper, we propose HAMLET, a scalable framework to adapt VLAs to attend to the historical context during action prediction. Specifically, we introduce moment tokens that compactly encode perceptual information at each timestep. Their representations are initialized with time-contrastive learning, allowing them to better capture temporally distinctive aspects. Next, we employ a lightweight memory module that integrates the moment tokens across past timesteps into memory features, which are then leveraged for action prediction. Through empirical evaluation, we show that HAMLET successfully transforms a state-of-the-art VLA into a history-aware policy, especially demonstrating significant improvements on long-horizon tasks that require historical context. In particular, on top of GR00T N1.5, HAMLET achieves an average success rate of 76.4% on history-dependent real-world tasks, surpassing the baseline performance by 47.2%. Furthermore, HAMLET pushes prior art performance from 64.1% to 66.4% on RoboCasa Kitchen (100-demo setup) and from 95.6% to 97.7% on LIBERO, highlighting its effectiveness even under generic robot-manipulation benchmarks.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.7% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms π_{0.5}, a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. Code and weights are released to support the open-source community.

Vision--language--action (VLA) models have recently shown promising performance on a variety of embodied tasks, yet they still fall short in reliability and generalization, especially when deployed across different embodiments or real-world environments. In this work, we introduce NORA-1.5, a VLA model built from the pre-trained NORA backbone by adding to it a flow-matching-based action expert. This architectural enhancement alone yields substantial performance gains, enabling NORA-1.5 to outperform NORA and several state-of-the-art VLA models across both simulated and real-world benchmarks. To further improve robustness and task success, we develop a set of reward models for post-training VLA policies. Our rewards combine (i) an action-conditioned world model (WM) that evaluates whether generated actions lead toward the desired goal, and (ii) a deviation-from-ground-truth heuristic that distinguishes good actions from poor ones. Using these reward signals, we construct preference datasets and adapt NORA-1.5 to target embodiments through direct preference optimization (DPO). Extensive evaluations show that reward-driven post-training consistently improves performance in both simulation and real-robot settings, demonstrating significant VLA model-reliability gains through simple yet effective reward models. Our findings highlight NORA-1.5 and reward-guided post-training as a viable path toward more dependable embodied agents suitable for real-world deployment.

To build a generalizable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with strong reasoning ability, a common strategy is to first train a specialist VLA on robot demonstrations to acquire reliable manipulation skills, and then incorporate mixed annotated robot data together with multimodal data to restore broader reasoning capabilities. However, we observe that the resulting reasoning VLA often suffers from degraded action performance compared to the specialist model before fine-tuning, a phenomenon we refer to as action degeneration. To address this issue, we propose DualVLA, which enhances action performance through carefully designed post-training while still preserving reasoning capability. We first introduce a dual-layer data pruning method that removes redundant embodied reasoning, preventing it from adversely influencing action learning. To further strengthen action generation, we design a dual-teacher adaptive distillation strategy that assigns different supervision signals to different data domains while maintaining reasoning ability. To fill the evaluation gap for generalist VLAs, we also propose VLA Score, which decouples VLA capability into reasoning, intention, action, and alignment dimensions for a more fine-grained assessment. Experiments show that DualVLA achieves an average success rate of 61.0 in SimplerEnv and an average score of 65.4 across eight competitive multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating a stronger balance between precise action execution and multimodal understanding. Project Website: https://costaliya.github.io/DualVLA/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable potential in visuomotor control and instruction comprehension through end-to-end learning processes. However, current VLA models face significant challenges: they are slow during inference and require extensive pre-training on large amounts of robotic data, making real-world deployment difficult. In this paper, we introduce a new family of compact vision-language-action models, called TinyVLA, which offers two key advantages over existing VLA models: (1) faster inference speeds, and (2) improved data efficiency, eliminating the need for pre-training stage. Our framework incorporates two essential components to build TinyVLA: (1) initializing the policy backbone with robust, high-speed multimodal models, and (2) integrating a diffusion policy decoder during fine-tuning to enable precise robot actions. We conducted extensive evaluations of TinyVLA in both simulation and on real robots, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art VLA model, OpenVLA, in terms of speed and data efficiency, while delivering comparable or superior performance. Additionally, TinyVLA exhibits strong generalization capabilities across various dimensions, including language instructions, novel objects, unseen positions, changes in object appearance, background variations, and environmental shifts, often matching or exceeding the performance of OpenVLA. We believe that \methodname offers an interesting perspective on utilizing pre-trained multimodal models for policy learning. Our project is at https://tiny-vla.github.io.

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have greatly improved embodied AI, enabling robots to follow natural language instructions and perform diverse tasks. However, their reliance on uncurated training datasets raises serious security concerns. Existing backdoor attacks on VLAs mostly assume white-box access and result in task failures instead of enforcing specific actions. In this work, we reveal a more practical threat: attackers can manipulate VLAs by simply injecting physical objects as triggers into the training dataset. We propose goal-oriented backdoor attacks (GoBA), where the VLA behaves normally in the absence of physical triggers but executes predefined and goal-oriented actions in the presence of physical triggers. Specifically, based on a popular VLA benchmark LIBERO, we introduce BadLIBERO that incorporates diverse physical triggers and goal-oriented backdoor actions. In addition, we propose a three-level evaluation that categorizes the victim VLA's actions under GoBA into three states: nothing to do, try to do, and success to do. Experiments show that GoBA enables the victim VLA to successfully achieve the backdoor goal in 97 percentage of inputs when the physical trigger is present, while causing zero performance degradation on clean inputs. Finally, by investigating factors related to GoBA, we find that the action trajectory and trigger color significantly influence attack performance, while trigger size has surprisingly little effect. The code and BadLIBERO dataset are accessible via the project page at https://goba-attack.github.io/.

Due to their ability of follow natural language instructions, vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly prevalent in the embodied AI arena, following the widespread success of their precursors -- LLMs and VLMs. In this paper, we discuss 10 principal milestones in the ongoing development of VLA models -- multimodality, reasoning, data, evaluation, cross-robot action generalization, efficiency, whole-body coordination, safety, agents, and coordination with humans. Furthermore, we discuss the emerging trends of using spatial understanding, modeling world dynamics, post training, and data synthesis -- all aiming to reach these milestones. Through these discussions, we hope to bring attention to the research avenues that may accelerate the development of VLA models into wider acceptability.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates the development of new benchmarks to accurately assess their capabilities. To address this need for Vietnamese, this work aims to introduce ViLLM-Eval, the comprehensive evaluation suite designed to measure the advanced knowledge and reasoning abilities of foundation models within a Vietnamese context. ViLLM-Eval consists of multiple-choice questions and predict next word tasks spanning various difficulty levels and diverse disciplines, ranging from humanities to science and engineering. A thorough evaluation of the most advanced LLMs on ViLLM-Eval revealed that even the best performing models have significant room for improvement in understanding and responding to Vietnamese language tasks. ViLLM-Eval is believed to be instrumental in identifying key strengths and weaknesses of foundation models, ultimately promoting their development and enhancing their performance for Vietnamese users. This paper provides a thorough overview of ViLLM-Eval as part of the Vietnamese Large Language Model shared task, held within the 10th International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2023).

The advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has expanded AI capabilities to visual modalities, yet existing evaluation benchmarks remain limited to single-video understanding, overlooking the critical need for multi-video understanding in real-world scenarios (e.g., sports analytics and autonomous driving). To address this significant gap, we introduce MVU-Eval, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Multi-Video Understanding for MLLMs. Specifically, our MVU-Eval mainly assesses eight core competencies through 1,824 meticulously curated question-answer pairs spanning 4,959 videos from diverse domains, addressing both fundamental perception tasks and high-order reasoning tasks. These capabilities are rigorously aligned with real-world applications such as multi-sensor synthesis in autonomous systems and cross-angle sports analytics. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models, we reveal significant performance discrepancies and limitations in current MLLMs' ability to perform understanding across multiple videos. The benchmark will be made publicly available to foster future research.

8 years after the visual question answering (VQA) task was proposed, accuracy remains the primary metric for automatic evaluation. VQA Accuracy has been effective so far in the IID evaluation setting. However, our community is undergoing a shift towards open-ended generative models and OOD evaluation. In this new paradigm, the existing VQA Accuracy metric is overly stringent and underestimates the performance of VQA systems. Thus, there is a need to develop more robust automatic VQA metrics that serve as a proxy for human judgment. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to build a better VQA metric. We formulate VQA evaluation as an answer-rating task where the LLM is instructed to score the accuracy of a candidate answer given a set of reference answers. We demonstrate the proposed metric better correlates with human judgment compared to existing metrics across several VQA models and benchmarks. We hope wide adoption of our metric will contribute to better estimating the research progress on the VQA task. We plan to release the evaluation code and collected human judgments.

Current vision-language-action (VLA) models, pre-trained on large-scale robotic data, exhibit strong multi-task capabilities and generalize well to variations in visual and language instructions for manipulation. However, their success rate drops significantly when faced with object concepts outside the training data, such as unseen object descriptions and textures in the dataset. To address this, we propose a novel agentic framework, VLA^2, which leverages OpenVLA as the execution backbone and effectively leverages external modules such as web retrieval and object detection to provide visual and textual knowledge about target objects to the VLA. This approach mitigates generalization failure when handling out-of-distribution objects. Based on the LIBERO simulation environment, we introduced novel objects and object descriptions to construct a new evaluation benchmark with three difficulty levels to test the effectiveness of our method. Our framework successfully outperformed the current state-of-the-art models on our designed hard-level generalization benchmark. Compared to the standalone OpenVLA baseline, VLA^2 achieves a 44.2% improvement in the success rate in the hard-level benchmark and an average improvement of 20.2% in all customized environments without any performance degradation on in-domain tasks. Project website: https://vla-2.github.io.

We propose MM-Vet, an evaluation benchmark that examines large multimodal models (LMMs) on complicated multimodal tasks. Recent LMMs have shown various intriguing abilities, such as solving math problems written on the blackboard, reasoning about events and celebrities in news images, and explaining visual jokes. Rapid model advancements pose challenges to evaluation benchmark development. Problems include: (1) How to systematically structure and evaluate the complicated multimodal tasks; (2) How to design evaluation metrics that work well across question and answer types; and (3) How to give model insights beyond a simple performance ranking. To this end, we present MM-Vet, designed based on the insight that the intriguing ability to solve complicated tasks is often achieved by a generalist model being able to integrate different core vision-language (VL) capabilities. MM-Vet defines 6 core VL capabilities and examines the 16 integrations of interest derived from the capability combination. For evaluation metrics, we propose an LLM-based evaluator for open-ended outputs. The evaluator enables the evaluation across different question types and answer styles, resulting in a unified scoring metric. We evaluate representative LMMs on MM-Vet, providing insights into the capabilities of different LMM system paradigms and models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/yuweihao/MM-Vet.

Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. We present a mixed-initiative approach to ``validate the validators'' -- aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions (be it prompts or code) with human requirements. Our interface, EvalGen, provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. While generating candidate implementations (Python functions, LLM grader prompts), EvalGen asks humans to grade a subset of LLM outputs; this feedback is used to select implementations that better align with user grades. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. In particular, we identify a phenomenon we dub criteria drift: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria. What is more, some criteria appears dependent on the specific LLM outputs observed (rather than independent criteria that can be defined a priori), raising serious questions for approaches that assume the independence of evaluation from observation of model outputs. We present our interface and implementation details, a comparison of our algorithm with a baseline approach, and implications for the design of future LLM evaluation assistants.

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under distribution shifts. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to overcome these limitations by optimizing for task objectives via trial-and-error, yet a systematic understanding of its specific generalization benefits for VLAs compared to SFT is lacking. To address this, our study introduces a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLA generalization and systematically investigates the impact of RL fine-tuning across diverse visual, semantic, and execution dimensions. Our extensive experiments reveal that RL fine-tuning, particularly with PPO, significantly enhances generalization in semantic understanding and execution robustness over SFT, while maintaining comparable visual robustness. We identify PPO as a more effective RL algorithm for VLAs than LLM-derived methods like DPO and GRPO. We also develop a simple recipe for efficient PPO training on VLAs, and demonstrate its practical utility for improving VLA generalization. The project page is at https://rlvla.github.io

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) hold immense promise for enabling generalist robot manipulation. However, the best way to build them remains an open question. Current approaches often add complexity, such as modifying the existing vocabulary of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with action tokens or introducing special action heads. Curiously, the simplest strategy of representing actions directly as text has remained largely unexplored. This work introduces VLA-0 to investigate this idea. We find that VLA-0 is not only effective; it is surprisingly powerful. With the right design, VLA-0 outperforms more involved models. On LIBERO, a popular benchmark for evaluating VLAs, VLA-0 outperforms all existing methods trained on the same robotic data, including pi_0.5-KI, OpenVLA-OFT and SmolVLA. Furthermore, without large-scale robotics-specific training, it outperforms methods trained on large-scale robotic data, like pi_0.5-KI, pi_0, GR00T-N1 and MolmoAct. These findings also translate to the real world, where VLA-0 outperforms SmolVLA, a VLA model pre-trained on large-scale real data. This paper summarizes our unexpected findings and spells out the specific techniques required to unlock the high performance of this simple yet potent VLA design. Visual results, code, and trained models are provided here: https://vla0.github.io/.

With the rapid growth of video generative models (VGMs), it is essential to develop reliable and comprehensive automatic metrics for AI-generated videos (AIGVs). Existing methods either use off-the-shelf models optimized for other tasks or rely on human assessment data to train specialized evaluators. These approaches are constrained to specific evaluation aspects and are difficult to scale with the increasing demands for finer-grained and more comprehensive evaluations. To address this issue, this work investigates the feasibility of using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as a unified evaluator for AIGVs, leveraging their strong visual perception and language understanding capabilities. To evaluate the performance of automatic metrics in unified AIGV evaluation, we introduce a benchmark called UVE-Bench. UVE-Bench collects videos generated by state-of-the-art VGMs and provides pairwise human preference annotations across 15 evaluation aspects. Using UVE-Bench, we extensively evaluate 16 MLLMs. Our empirical results suggest that while advanced MLLMs (e.g., Qwen2VL-72B and InternVL2.5-78B) still lag behind human evaluators, they demonstrate promising ability in unified AIGV evaluation, significantly surpassing existing specialized evaluation methods. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of key design choices that impact the performance of MLLM-driven evaluators, offering valuable insights for future research on AIGV evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/UVE.

Visual Question-Answering (VQA) has become a key use-case in several applications to aid user experience, particularly after Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieving good results in zero-shot inference. But evaluating different VLMs for an application requirement using a standardized framework in practical settings is still challenging. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating VLMs tailored to VQA tasks in practical settings. We present a novel dataset derived from established VQA benchmarks, annotated with task types, application domains, and knowledge types, three key practical aspects on which tasks can vary. We also introduce GoEval, a multimodal evaluation metric developed using GPT-4o, achieving a correlation factor of 56.71% with human judgments. Our experiments with ten state-of-the-art VLMs reveals that no single model excelling universally, making appropriate selection a key design decision. Proprietary models such as Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4o-mini generally outperform others, though open-source models like InternVL-2-8B and CogVLM-2-Llama-3-19B demonstrate competitive strengths in specific contexts, while providing additional advantages. This study guides the selection of VLMs based on specific task requirements and resource constraints, and can also be extended to other vision-language tasks.

The recent emergence of Large Vision-Language Models(VLMs) has resulted in a variety of different benchmarks for evaluating such models. Despite this, we observe that most existing evaluation methods suffer from the fact that they either require the model to choose from pre-determined responses, sacrificing open-endedness, or evaluate responses using a judge model, resulting in subjective and unreliable evaluation. In addition, we observe a lack of benchmarks for VLMs in the Korean language, which are necessary as a separate metric from more common English language benchmarks, as the performance of generative language models can differ significantly based on the language being used. Therefore, we present KOFFVQA, a general-purpose free-form visual question answering benchmark in the Korean language for the evaluation of VLMs. Our benchmark consists of 275 carefully crafted questions each paired with an image and grading criteria covering 10 different aspects of VLM performance. The grading criteria eliminate the problem of unreliability by allowing the judge model to grade each response based on a pre-determined set of rules. By defining the evaluation criteria in an objective manner, even a small open-source model can be used to evaluate models on our benchmark reliably. In addition to evaluating a large number of existing VLMs on our benchmark, we also experimentally verify that our method of using pre-existing grading criteria for evaluation is much more reliable than existing methods. Our evaluation code is available at https://github.com/maum-ai/KOFFVQA

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in medical image analysis. However, their capabilities in interpreting fundus images, a critical skill for ophthalmology, remain under-evaluated. Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained task divisions and fail to provide modular analysis of its two key modules, i.e., large language model (LLM) and vision encoder (VE). This paper introduces FunBench, a novel visual question answering (VQA) benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate MLLMs' fundus reading skills. FunBench features a hierarchical task organization across four levels (modality perception, anatomy perception, lesion analysis, and disease diagnosis). It also offers three targeted evaluation modes: linear-probe based VE evaluation, knowledge-prompted LLM evaluation, and holistic evaluation. Experiments on nine open-source MLLMs plus GPT-4o reveal significant deficiencies in fundus reading skills, particularly in basic tasks such as laterality recognition. The results highlight the limitations of current MLLMs and emphasize the need for domain-specific training and improved LLMs and VEs.

Assessing long-form responses generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is challenging. It not only requires checking whether the VLM follows the given instruction but also verifying whether the text output is properly grounded on the given image. Inspired by the recent approach of evaluating LMs with LMs, in this work, we propose to evaluate VLMs with VLMs. For this purpose, we present a new feedback dataset called the Perception Collection, encompassing 15K customized score rubrics that users might care about during assessment. Using the Perception Collection, we train Prometheus-Vision, the first open-source VLM evaluator model that can understand the user-defined score criteria during evaluation. Prometheus-Vision shows the highest Pearson correlation with human evaluators and GPT-4V among open-source models, showing its effectiveness for transparent and accessible evaluation of VLMs. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/kaistAI/prometheus-vision

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become essential for advancing the integration of visual and linguistic information. However, the evaluation of LVLMs presents significant challenges as the evaluation benchmark always demands lots of human cost for its construction, and remains static, lacking flexibility once constructed. Even though automatic evaluation has been explored in textual modality, the visual modality remains under-explored. As a result, in this work, we address a question: "Can LVLMs themselves be used to benchmark each other in the visual automatically domain?". We introduce AutoBench-V, an automated framework for serving evaluation on demand, i.e., benchmarking LVLMs based on specific aspects of model capability. AutoBench-V leverages text-to-image models to generate relevant image samples and then utilizes LVLMs to orchestrate visual question-answering (VQA) tasks, completing the evaluation process efficiently and flexibly. Through an extensive evaluation of nine popular LVLMs across five demanded user inputs (i.e., evaluation capabilities), the framework shows effectiveness and reliability.

Recent high-capacity vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of robotic manipulation tasks by imitating human demonstrations. However, exploiting offline data with limited visited states will cause execution failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Intuitively, an exploration-based method that improves on online collected data at test time could address this limitation. We present VLA-RL, an algorithmic and systematic framework that leverages online reinforcement learning (RL) to improve pretrained auto-regressive VLAs in downstream tasks. Within a unified perspective, we first introduce a trajectory-level RL formulation for auto-regressive VLA training, which models general robotic manipulation trajectory as multi-modal multi-turn conversation. To address the challenge of sparse rewards, we fine-tune a pretrained vision-language model as a robotic process reward model, which is trained on pseudo reward labels annotated on automatically extracted task segments. To scale up, we identify several implementation findings that improve the stability and efficiency including curriculum selection strategy, GPU-balanced vectorized environments, batch decoding, and critic warmup. VLA-RL enables OpenVLA-7B to surpass the strongest finetuned baseline by 4.5% on 40 challenging robotic manipulation tasks in LIBERO, and even matches the performance of advanced commercial models such as pi_0-FAST. Notably, we observe that VLA-RL benefits from increased test-time optimization, indicating an early spark of inference scaling laws in robotics.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in industry is accelerating the shift from traditional automation to intelligent systems with perception and cognition. Vision language-action (VLA) models have been a key paradigm in AI to unify perception, reasoning, and control. Has the performance of the VLA models met the industrial requirements? In this paper, from the perspective of industrial deployment, we compare the performance of existing state-of-the-art VLA models in industrial scenarios and analyze the limitations of VLA models for real-world industrial deployment from the perspectives of data collection and model architecture. The results show that the VLA models retain their ability to perform simple grasping tasks even in industrial settings after fine-tuning. However, there is much room for performance improvement in complex industrial environments, diverse object categories, and high precision placing tasks. Our findings provide practical insight into the adaptability of VLA models for industrial use and highlight the need for task-specific enhancements to improve their robustness, generalization, and precision.

One promise that Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models hold over traditional imitation learning for robotics is to leverage the broad generalization capabilities of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to produce versatile, "generalist" robot policies. However, current evaluations of VLAs remain insufficient. Traditional imitation learning benchmarks are unsuitable due to the lack of language instructions. Emerging benchmarks for VLAs that incorporate language often come with limited evaluation tasks and do not intend to investigate how much VLM pretraining truly contributes to the generalization capabilities of the downstream robotic policy. Meanwhile, much research relies on real-world robot setups designed in isolation by different institutions, which creates a barrier for reproducibility and accessibility. To address this gap, we introduce a unified probing suite of 50 simulation-based tasks across 10 subcategories spanning language instruction, vision, and objects. We systematically evaluate several state-of-the-art VLA architectures on this suite to understand their generalization capability. Our results show that while VLM backbones endow VLAs with robust perceptual understanding and high level planning, which we refer to as good intentions, this does not reliably translate into precise motor execution: when faced with out-of-distribution observations, policies often exhibit coherent intentions, but falter in action execution. Moreover, finetuning on action data can erode the original VLM's generalist reasoning abilities. We release our task suite and evaluation code to serve as a standardized benchmark for future VLAs and to drive research on closing the perception-to-action gap. More information, including the source code, can be found at https://ai4ce.github.io/INT-ACT/

Evaluating the alignment capabilities of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is essential for determining their effectiveness as helpful assistants. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing AlignMMBench, a comprehensive alignment benchmark specifically designed for emerging Chinese VLMs. This benchmark is meticulously curated from real-world scenarios and Chinese Internet sources, encompassing thirteen specific tasks across three categories, and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Incorporating a prompt rewrite strategy, AlignMMBench encompasses 1,054 images and 4,978 question-answer pairs. To facilitate the evaluation pipeline, we propose CritiqueVLM, a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability. Finally, we report the performance of representative VLMs on AlignMMBench, offering insights into the capabilities and limitations of different VLM architectures. All evaluation codes and data are available on https://alignmmbench.github.io.

Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on English multimodal tasks, but their performance on low-resource languages with genuinely multimodal educational content remains largely unexplored. In this work, we test how VLMs perform on Vietnamese educational assessments, investigating whether VLMs trained predominantly on English data can handle real-world cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. Our work presents the first comprehensive evaluation of VLM capabilities on multimodal Vietnamese exams through proposing ViExam, a benchmark containing 2,548 multimodal questions. We find that state-of-the-art VLMs achieve only 57.74% while open-source models achieve 27.70% mean accuracy across 7 academic domains, including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Driving Test, and IQ Test. Most VLMs underperform average human test-takers (66.54%), with only the thinking VLM o3 (74.07%) exceeding human average performance, yet still falling substantially short of human best performance (99.60%). Cross-lingual prompting with English instructions while maintaining Vietnamese content fails to improve performance, decreasing accuracy by 1 percentage point for SOTA VLMs. Human-in-the-loop collaboration can partially improve VLM performance by 5 percentage points. Code and data are available at: https://vi-exam.github.io.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been regarded as a breakthrough advance in an astoundingly variety of tasks, from content generation to virtual assistants and multimodal search or retrieval. However, for many of these applications, the performance of these methods has been widely criticized, particularly when compared with state-of-the-art methods and technologies in each specific domain. In this work, we compare the performance of the leading large vision-language models in the human re-identification task, using as baseline the performance attained by state-of-the-art AI models specifically designed for this problem. We compare the results due to ChatGPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Qwen-VL-Max to a baseline ReID PersonViT model, using the well-known Market1501 dataset. Our evaluation pipeline includes the dataset curation, prompt engineering, and metric selection to assess the models' performance. Results are analyzed from many different perspectives: similarity scores, classification accuracy, and classification metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and area under curve (AUC). Our results confirm the strengths of LVLMs, but also their severe limitations that often lead to catastrophic answers and should be the scope of further research. As a concluding remark, we speculate about some further research that should fuse traditional and LVLMs to combine the strengths from both families of techniques and achieve solid improvements in performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators in natural language processing tasks, a paradigm known as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ). While effective in general domains, LaaJs pose significant challenges in domain-specific contexts, where annotated data is scarce and expert evaluation is costly. In such cases, meta-evaluation is often performed using metrics that have not been validated for the specific domain in which they are applied. As a result, it becomes difficult to determine which metrics effectively identify LaaJ quality, and further, what threshold indicates sufficient evaluator performance. In this work, we introduce LaaJMeter, a simulation-based framework for controlled meta-evaluation of LaaJs. LaaJMeter enables engineers to generate synthetic data representing virtual models and judges, allowing systematic analysis of evaluation metrics under realistic conditions. This helps practitioners validate and refine LaaJs for specific evaluation tasks: they can test whether their metrics correctly distinguish between better and worse (virtual) LaaJs, and estimate appropriate thresholds for evaluator adequacy. We demonstrate the utility of LaaJMeter in a code translation task involving a legacy programming language, showing how different metrics vary in sensitivity to evaluator quality. Our results highlight the limitations of common metrics and the importance of principled metric selection. LaaJMeter provides a scalable and extensible solution for assessing LaaJs in low-resource settings, contributing to the broader effort to ensure trustworthy and reproducible evaluation in NLP.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained much attention from the research community thanks to their strength in translating multimodal observations with linguistic instructions into robotic actions. Despite their recent advancements, VLAs often overlook the explicit reasoning and only learn the functional input-action mappings, omitting these crucial logical steps for interpretability and generalization for complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose ReFineVLA, a multimodal reasoning-aware framework that fine-tunes VLAs with teacher-guided reasons. We first augment robotic datasets with reasoning rationales generated by an expert teacher model, guiding VLA models to learn to reason about their actions. Then, we use ReFineVLA to fine-tune pre-trained VLAs with the reasoning-enriched datasets, while maintaining their inherent generalization abilities and boosting reasoning capabilities. In addition, we conduct an attention map visualization to analyze the alignment among visual attention, linguistic prompts, and to-be-executed actions of ReFineVLA, showcasing its ability to focus on relevant tasks and actions. Through the latter step, we explore that ReFineVLA-trained models exhibit a meaningful attention shift towards relevant objects, highlighting the enhanced multimodal understanding and improved generalization. Evaluated across manipulation tasks, ReFineVLA outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, it achieves an average increase of 5.0% success rate on SimplerEnv WidowX Robot tasks, improves by an average of 8.6% in variant aggregation settings, and by 1.7% in visual matching settings for SimplerEnv Google Robot tasks. The source code will be publicly available.

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models have recently successfully facilitated many cross-modal downstream tasks. Most existing works evaluated their systems by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method, let alone provides insights on how the community can improve the systems in the future. Inspired by the CheckList for testing natural language processing, we exploit VL-CheckList, a novel framework to understand the capabilities of VLP models. The proposed method divides the image-texting ability of a VLP model into three categories: objects, attributes, and relations, and uses a novel taxonomy to further break down these three aspects. We conduct comprehensive studies to analyze seven recently popular VLP models via the proposed framework. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by revealing fine-grained differences among the compared models that were not visible from downstream task-only evaluation. Further results show promising research direction in building better VLP models. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, pre-trained VLA policies still suffer from substantial performance degradation during downstream deployment. Although fine-tuning can mitigate this issue, its reliance on costly demonstration collection and intensive computation makes it impractical in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce VLA-Pilot, a plug-and-play inference-time policy steering method for zero-shot deployment of pre-trained VLA without any additional fine-tuning or data collection. We evaluate VLA-Pilot on six real-world downstream manipulation tasks across two distinct robotic embodiments, encompassing both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VLA-Pilot substantially boosts the success rates of off-the-shelf pre-trained VLA policies, enabling robust zero-shot generalization to diverse tasks and embodiments. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://rip4kobe.github.io/vla-pilot/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often generate plausible but incorrect responses to visual queries. However, reliably quantifying the effect of such hallucinations in free-form responses to open-ended queries is challenging as it requires visually verifying each claim within the response. We propose Programmatic VLM Evaluation (PROVE), a new benchmarking paradigm for evaluating VLM responses to open-ended queries. To construct PROVE, we provide a large language model (LLM) with a high-fidelity scene-graph representation constructed from a hyper-detailed image caption, and prompt it to generate diverse question-answer (QA) pairs, as well as programs that can be executed over the scene graph object to verify each QA pair. We thus construct a benchmark of 10.5k challenging but visually grounded QA pairs. Next, to evaluate free-form model responses to queries in PROVE, we propose a programmatic evaluation strategy that measures both the helpfulness and truthfulness of a response within a unified scene graph-based framework. We benchmark the helpfulness-truthfulness trade-offs of a range of VLMs on PROVE, finding that very few are in-fact able to achieve a good balance between the two. Project page: https://prove-explorer.netlify.app/.

Program synthesis has been long studied with recent approaches focused on directly using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. Programming benchmarks, with curated synthesis problems and test-cases, are used to measure the performance of various LLMs on code synthesis. However, these test-cases can be limited in both quantity and quality for fully assessing the functional correctness of the generated code. Such limitation in the existing benchmarks begs the following question: In the era of LLMs, is the code generated really correct? To answer this, we propose EvalPlus -- a code synthesis evaluation framework to rigorously benchmark the functional correctness of LLM-synthesized code. EvalPlus augments a given evaluation dataset with large amounts of test-cases newly produced by an automatic test input generator, powered by both LLM- and mutation-based strategies. While EvalPlus is general, we extend the test-cases of the popular HumanEval benchmark by 80x to build HumanEval+. Our extensive evaluation across 26 popular LLMs (e.g., GPT-4 and ChatGPT) demonstrates that HumanEval+ is able to catch significant amounts of previously undetected wrong code synthesized by LLMs, reducing the pass@k by up-to 19.3-28.9%. We also surprisingly found that test insufficiency can lead to mis-ranking. For example, both WizardCoder-CodeLlama and Phind-CodeLlama now outperform ChatGPT on HumanEval+, while none of them could on HumanEval. Our work not only indicates that prior popular code synthesis evaluation results do not accurately reflect the true performance of LLMs for code synthesis, but also opens up a new direction to improve such programming benchmarks through automated testing. We have open-sourced our tools, enhanced datasets as well as all LLM-generated code at https://github.com/evalplus/evalplus to facilitate and accelerate future LLM-for-code research.

Radiologists play a crucial role by translating medical images into medical reports. However, the field faces staffing shortages and increasing workloads. While automated approaches using vision-language models (VLMs) show promise as assistants, they require exceptionally high accuracy. Most current VLMs in radiology rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Meanwhile, in the general domain, additional preference fine-tuning has become standard practice. The challenge in radiology lies in the prohibitive cost of obtaining radiologist feedback. We propose a scalable automated preference alignment technique for VLMs in radiology, focusing on chest X-ray (CXR) report generation. Our method leverages publicly available datasets with an LLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, eliminating the need for additional expert radiologist feedback. We evaluate and benchmark five direct alignment algorithms (DAAs). Our results show up to a 57.4% improvement in average GREEN scores, a LLM-based metric for evaluating CXR reports, and a 9.2% increase in an average across six metrics (domain specific and general), compared to the SFT baseline. We study reward overoptimization via length exploitation, with reports lengthening by up to 3.2x. To assess a potential alignment tax, we benchmark on six additional diverse tasks, finding no significant degradations. A reader study involving four board-certified radiologists indicates win rates of up to 0.62 over the SFT baseline, while significantly penalizing verbosity. Our analysis provides actionable insights for the development of VLMs in high-stakes fields like radiology.

One core capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to follow natural language instructions. However, the evaluation of such abilities is not standardized: Human evaluations are expensive, slow, and not objectively reproducible, while LLM-based auto-evaluation is potentially biased or limited by the ability of the evaluator LLM. To overcome these issues, we introduce Instruction-Following Eval (IFEval) for large language models. IFEval is a straightforward and easy-to-reproduce evaluation benchmark. It focuses on a set of "verifiable instructions" such as "write in more than 400 words" and "mention the keyword of AI at least 3 times". We identified 25 types of those verifiable instructions and constructed around 500 prompts, with each prompt containing one or more verifiable instructions. We show evaluation results of two widely available LLMs on the market. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/instruction_following_eval

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

We propose the VLR-Bench, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark for evaluating vision language models (VLMs) based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Unlike existing evaluation datasets for external knowledge-based VQA, the proposed VLR-Bench includes five input passages. This allows testing of the ability to determine which passage is useful for answering a given query, a capability lacking in previous research. In this context, we constructed a dataset of 32,000 automatically generated instruction-following examples, which we denote as VLR-IF. This dataset is specifically designed to enhance the RAG capabilities of VLMs by enabling them to learn how to generate appropriate answers based on input passages. We evaluated the validity of the proposed benchmark and training data and verified its performance using the state-of-the-art Llama3-based VLM, the Llava-Llama-3 model. The proposed VLR-Bench and VLR-IF datasets are publicly available online.

Evaluation is a key part of machine learning (ML), yet there is a lack of support and tooling to enable its informed and systematic practice. We introduce Evaluate and Evaluation on the Hub --a set of tools to facilitate the evaluation of models and datasets in ML. Evaluate is a library to support best practices for measurements, metrics, and comparisons of data and models. Its goal is to support reproducibility of evaluation, centralize and document the evaluation process, and broaden evaluation to cover more facets of model performance. It includes over 50 efficient canonical implementations for a variety of domains and scenarios, interactive documentation, and the ability to easily share implementations and outcomes. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/evaluate. In addition, we introduce Evaluation on the Hub, a platform that enables the large-scale evaluation of over 75,000 models and 11,000 datasets on the Hugging Face Hub, for free, at the click of a button. Evaluation on the Hub is available at https://huggingface.co/autoevaluate.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown substantial potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, fine-tuning these models through supervised learning struggles to achieve robust performance due to limited, inconsistent demonstrations, especially in contact-rich environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforced fine-tuning approach for VLA models, named ConRFT, which consists of offline and online fine-tuning with a unified consistency-based training objective, to address these challenges. In the offline stage, our method integrates behavior cloning and Q-learning to effectively extract policy from a small set of demonstrations and stabilize value estimating. In the online stage, the VLA model is further fine-tuned via consistency policy, with human interventions to ensure safe exploration and high sample efficiency. We evaluate our approach on eight diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 96.3% within 45-90 minutes of online fine-tuning, outperforming prior supervised methods with a 144% improvement in success rate and 1.9x shorter episode length. This work highlights the potential of integrating reinforcement learning to enhance the performance of VLA models for real-world robotic applications. Videos and code are available at our project website https://cccedric.github.io/conrft/.

Autonomous driving, particularly navigating complex and unanticipated scenarios, demands sophisticated reasoning and planning capabilities. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising avenue for this, their use has been largely confined to understanding complex environmental contexts or generating high-level driving commands, with few studies extending their application to end-to-end path planning. A major research bottleneck is the lack of large-scale annotated datasets encompassing vision, language, and action. To address this issue, we propose CoVLA (Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action) Dataset, an extensive dataset comprising real-world driving videos spanning more than 80 hours. This dataset leverages a novel, scalable approach based on automated data processing and a caption generation pipeline to generate accurate driving trajectories paired with detailed natural language descriptions of driving environments and maneuvers. This approach utilizes raw in-vehicle sensor data, allowing it to surpass existing datasets in scale and annotation richness. Using CoVLA, we investigate the driving capabilities of MLLMs that can handle vision, language, and action in a variety of driving scenarios. Our results illustrate the strong proficiency of our model in generating coherent language and action outputs, emphasizing the potential of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in the field of autonomous driving. This dataset establishes a framework for robust, interpretable, and data-driven autonomous driving systems by providing a comprehensive platform for training and evaluating VLA models, contributing to safer and more reliable self-driving vehicles. The dataset is released for academic purpose.

MM-Vet, with open-ended vision-language questions targeting at evaluating integrated capabilities, has become one of the most popular benchmarks for large multimodal model evaluation. MM-Vet assesses six core vision-language (VL) capabilities: recognition, knowledge, spatial awareness, language generation, OCR, and math. However, its question format is restricted to single image-text pairs, lacking the interleaved image and text sequences prevalent in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce MM-Vet v2, which includes a new VL capability called "image-text sequence understanding", evaluating models' ability to process VL sequences. Furthermore, we maintain the high quality of evaluation samples while further expanding the evaluation set size. Using MM-Vet v2 to benchmark large multimodal models, we found that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best model with a score of 71.8, slightly outperforming GPT-4o which scored 71.0. Among open-weight models, InternVL2-Llama3-76B leads with a score of 68.4.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across multimodal tasks such as visual perception and reasoning, leading to good performance on various multimodal evaluation benchmarks. However, these benchmarks keep a static nature and overlap with the pre-training data, resulting in fixed complexity constraints and data contamination issues. This raises the concern regarding the validity of the evaluation. To address these two challenges, we introduce a dynamic multimodal evaluation protocol called Vision-Language Bootstrapping (VLB). VLB provides a robust and comprehensive assessment for LVLMs with reduced data contamination and flexible complexity. To this end, VLB dynamically generates new visual question-answering samples through a multimodal bootstrapping module that modifies both images and language, while ensuring that newly generated samples remain consistent with the original ones by a judge module. By composing various bootstrapping strategies, VLB offers dynamic variants of existing benchmarks with diverse complexities, enabling the evaluation to co-evolve with the ever-evolving capabilities of LVLMs. Extensive experimental results across multiple benchmarks, including SEEDBench, MMBench, and MME, show that VLB significantly reduces data contamination and exposes performance limitations of LVLMs.

The rapid development of vision language models (VLMs) demands rigorous and reliable evaluation. However, current visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks often depend on open-ended questions, making accurate evaluation difficult due to the variability in natural language responses. To address this, we introduce AutoConverter, an agentic framework that automatically converts these open-ended questions into multiple-choice format, enabling objective evaluation while reducing the costly question creation process. Our experiments demonstrate that AutoConverter can generate correct and challenging multiple-choice questions, with VLMs demonstrating consistently similar or lower accuracy on these questions compared to human-created ones. Using AutoConverter, we construct VMCBench, a benchmark created by transforming 20 existing VQA datasets into a unified multiple-choice format, totaling 9,018 questions. We comprehensively evaluate 33 state-of-the-art VLMs on VMCBench, setting a new standard for scalable, consistent, and reproducible VLM evaluation.

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), VLM-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) seeks to describe image quality linguistically to align with human expression and capture the multifaceted nature of IQA tasks. However, current methods are still far from practical usage. First, prior works focus narrowly on specific sub-tasks or settings, which do not align with diverse real-world applications. Second, their performance is sub-optimal due to limitations in dataset coverage, scale, and quality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Depicted image Quality Assessment in the Wild (DepictQA-Wild). Our method includes a multi-functional IQA task paradigm that encompasses both assessment and comparison tasks, brief and detailed responses, full-reference and non-reference scenarios. We introduce a ground-truth-informed dataset construction approach to enhance data quality, and scale up the dataset to 495K under the brief-detail joint framework. Consequently, we construct a comprehensive, large-scale, and high-quality dataset, named DQ-495K. We also retain image resolution during training to better handle resolution-related quality issues, and estimate a confidence score that is helpful to filter out low-quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that DepictQA-Wild significantly outperforms traditional score-based methods, prior VLM-based IQA models, and proprietary GPT-4V in distortion identification, instant rating, and reasoning tasks. Our advantages are further confirmed by real-world applications including assessing the web-downloaded images and ranking model-processed images. Datasets and codes will be released in https://depictqa.github.io/depictqa-wild/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks demonstrate that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model in just 8 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying the VLA model. Project page: https://vla-adapter.github.io/.

With the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), datasets used for visual question answering (VQA) and referring expression comprehension have seen a resurgence. However, the most popular datasets used to evaluate MLLMs are some of the earliest ones created, and they have many known problems, including extreme bias, spurious correlations, and an inability to permit fine-grained analysis. In this paper, we pioneer evaluating recent MLLMs (LLaVA 1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, BLIP2, InstructBLIP, GPT-4V, and GPT-4o) on datasets designed to address weaknesses in earlier ones. We assess three VQA datasets: 1) TDIUC, which permits fine-grained analysis on 12 question types; 2) TallyQA, which has simple and complex counting questions; and 3) DVQA, which requires optical character recognition for chart understanding. We also study VQDv1, a dataset that requires identifying all image regions that satisfy a given query. Our experiments reveal the weaknesses of many MLLMs that have not previously been reported. Our code is integrated into the widely used LAVIS framework for MLLM evaluation, enabling the rapid assessment of future MLLMs. Project webpage: https://kevinlujian.github.io/MLLM_Evaluations/

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly used as evaluators in tasks (e.g., reward modeling, LLM-as-a-judge), where they act as proxies for human preferences or judgments. This leads to the need for meta-evaluation: evaluating the credibility of LLMs as evaluators. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on English, offering limited insight into LLMs' effectiveness as evaluators in non-English contexts. To address this, we introduce MM-Eval, a multilingual meta-evaluation benchmark that covers 18 languages across six categories. MM-Eval evaluates various dimensions, including language-specific challenges like linguistics and language hallucinations. Evaluation results show that both proprietary and open-source language models have considerable room for improvement. Further analysis reveals a tendency for these models to assign middle-ground scores to low-resource languages. We publicly release our benchmark and code.

With the ever-increasing popularity of pretrained Video-Language Models (VidLMs), there is a pressing need to develop robust evaluation methodologies that delve deeper into their visio-linguistic capabilities. To address this challenge, we present ViLMA (Video Language Model Assessment), a task-agnostic benchmark that places the assessment of fine-grained capabilities of these models on a firm footing. Task-based evaluations, while valuable, fail to capture the complexities and specific temporal aspects of moving images that VidLMs need to process. Through carefully curated counterfactuals, ViLMA offers a controlled evaluation suite that sheds light on the true potential of these models, as well as their performance gaps compared to human-level understanding. ViLMA also includes proficiency tests, which assess basic capabilities deemed essential to solving the main counterfactual tests. We show that current VidLMs' grounding abilities are no better than those of vision-language models which use static images. This is especially striking once the performance on proficiency tests is factored in. Our benchmark serves as a catalyst for future research on VidLMs, helping to highlight areas that still need to be explored.

The advancement of large Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has significantly improved robotic manipulation in terms of language-guided task execution and generalization to unseen scenarios. While existing VLAs adapted from pretrained large Vision-Language-Models (VLM) have demonstrated promising generalizability, their task performance is still unsatisfactory as indicated by the low tasks success rates in different environments. In this paper, we present a new advanced VLA architecture derived from VLM. Unlike previous works that directly repurpose VLM for action prediction by simple action quantization, we propose a omponentized VLA architecture that has a specialized action module conditioned on VLM output. We systematically study the design of the action module and demonstrates the strong performance enhancement with diffusion action transformers for action sequence modeling, as well as their favorable scaling behaviors. We also conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation studies to evaluate the efficacy of our models with varied designs. The evaluation on 5 robot embodiments in simulation and real work shows that our model not only significantly surpasses existing VLAs in task performance and but also exhibits remarkable adaptation to new robots and generalization to unseen objects and backgrounds. It exceeds the average success rates of OpenVLA which has similar model size (7B) with ours by over 35% in simulated evaluation and 55% in real robot experiments. It also outperforms the large RT-2-X model (55B) by 18% absolute success rates in simulation. Code and models can be found on our project page (https://cogact.github.io/).

Current benchmarks for assessing vision-language models (VLMs) often focus on their perception or problem-solving capabilities and neglect other critical aspects such as fairness, multilinguality, or toxicity. Furthermore, they differ in their evaluation procedures and the scope of the evaluation, making it difficult to compare models. To address these issues, we extend the HELM framework to VLMs to present the Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models (VHELM). VHELM aggregates various datasets to cover one or more of the 9 aspects: visual perception, knowledge, reasoning, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety. In doing so, we produce a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of the capabilities of the VLMs across these important factors. In addition, we standardize the standard inference parameters, methods of prompting, and evaluation metrics to enable fair comparisons across models. Our framework is designed to be lightweight and automatic so that evaluation runs are cheap and fast. Our initial run evaluates 22 VLMs on 21 existing datasets to provide a holistic snapshot of the models. We uncover new key findings, such as the fact that efficiency-focused models (e.g., Claude 3 Haiku or Gemini 1.5 Flash) perform significantly worse than their full models (e.g., Claude 3 Opus or Gemini 1.5 Pro) on the bias benchmark but not when evaluated on the other aspects. For transparency, we release the raw model generations and complete results on our website (https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/vhelm/v2.0.1). VHELM is intended to be a living benchmark, and we hope to continue adding new datasets and models over time.

Recent progress in vision and language foundation models has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation, inspiring a surge of interest in extending such capabilities to embodied settings through vision-language-action (VLA) models. Yet, most VLA models are still trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which struggles to generalize under distribution shifts due to error accumulation. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative by directly optimizing task performance through interaction, but existing attempts remain fragmented and lack a unified platform for fair and systematic comparison across model architectures and algorithmic designs. To address this gap, we introduce RLinf-VLA, a unified and efficient framework for scalable RL training of VLA models. The system adopts a highly flexible resource allocation design that addresses the challenge of integrating rendering, training, and inference in RL+VLA training. In particular, for GPU-parallelized simulators, RLinf-VLA implements a novel hybrid fine-grained pipeline allocation mode, achieving a 1.61x-1.88x speedup in training. Through a unified interface, RLinf-VLA seamlessly supports diverse VLA architectures (e.g., OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT), multiple RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and various simulators (e.g., ManiSkill, LIBERO). In simulation, a unified model achieves 98.11\% across 130 LIBERO tasks and 97.66\% across 25 ManiSkill tasks. Beyond empirical performance, our study distills a set of best practices for applying RL to VLA training and sheds light on emerging patterns in this integration. Furthermore, we present preliminary deployment on a real-world Franka robot, where RL-trained policies exhibit stronger generalization than those trained with SFT. We envision RLinf-VLA as a foundation to accelerate and standardize research on embodied intelligence.

Multimodal/vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly being deployed in healthcare settings worldwide, necessitating robust benchmarks to ensure their safety, efficacy, and fairness. Multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets derived from national medical examinations have long served as valuable evaluation tools, but existing datasets are largely text-only and available in a limited subset of languages and countries. To address these challenges, we present WorldMedQA-V, an updated multilingual, multimodal benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate VLMs in healthcare. WorldMedQA-V includes 568 labeled multiple-choice QAs paired with 568 medical images from four countries (Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Spain), covering original languages and validated English translations by native clinicians, respectively. Baseline performance for common open- and closed-source models are provided in the local language and English translations, and with and without images provided to the model. The WorldMedQA-V benchmark aims to better match AI systems to the diverse healthcare environments in which they are deployed, fostering more equitable, effective, and representative applications.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown impressive generalization and language-guided manipulation capabilities. However, their performance degrades on tasks requiring precise spatial reasoning due to limited spatial reasoning inherited from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on extensive action-data pretraining to ground VLMs in 3D space, which reduces training efficiency and is still insufficient for accurate spatial understanding. In this work, we present DepthVLA, a simple yet effective VLA architecture that explicitly incorporates spatial awareness through a pretrained depth prediction module. DepthVLA adopts a mixture-of-transformers design that unifies a VLM, a depth transformer, and an action expert with fully shared attentions, forming an end-to-end model with enhanced spatial reasoning. Extensive evaluations in both real-world and simulated environments show that DepthVLA outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 78.5% vs. 65.0% progress in real-world tasks, 94.9% vs. 93.6% in the LIBERO simulator, and 74.8% vs. 58.8% in the Simpler simulator. Our code will be made publicly available.

With the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have reached a new level of sophistication, showing notable competence in executing intricate cognition and reasoning tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks, primarily relying on rigid, hand-crafted datasets to measure task-specific performance, face significant limitations in assessing the alignment of these increasingly anthropomorphic models with human intelligence. In this work, we address the limitations via Auto-Bench, which delves into exploring LLMs as proficient aligners, measuring the alignment between VLMs and human intelligence and value through automatic data curation and assessment. Specifically, for data curation, Auto-Bench utilizes LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to automatically generate a vast set of question-answer-reasoning triplets via prompting on visual symbolic representations (e.g., captions, object locations, instance relationships, and etc.). The curated data closely matches human intent, owing to the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. Through this pipeline, a total of 28.5K human-verified and 3,504K unfiltered question-answer-reasoning triplets have been curated, covering 4 primary abilities and 16 sub-abilities. We subsequently engage LLMs like GPT-3.5 to serve as judges, implementing the quantitative and qualitative automated assessments to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs. Our validation results reveal that LLMs are proficient in both evaluation data curation and model assessment, achieving an average agreement rate of 85%. We envision Auto-Bench as a flexible, scalable, and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the evolving sophisticated VLMs.

As a prominent direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered increased attention from both industry and academia. Building upon pre-trained LLMs, this family of models further develops multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities that are impressive, such as writing code given a flow chart or creating stories based on an image. In the development process, evaluation is critical since it provides intuitive feedback and guidance on improving models. Distinct from the traditional train-eval-test paradigm that only favors a single task like image classification, the versatility of MLLMs has spurred the rise of various new benchmarks and evaluation methods. In this paper, we aim to present a comprehensive survey of MLLM evaluation, discussing four key aspects: 1) the summarised benchmarks types divided by the evaluation capabilities, including foundation capabilities, model self-analysis, and extented applications; 2) the typical process of benchmark counstruction, consisting of data collection, annotation, and precautions; 3) the systematic evaluation manner composed of judge, metric, and toolkit; 4) the outlook for the next benchmark. This work aims to offer researchers an easy grasp of how to effectively evaluate MLLMs according to different needs and to inspire better evaluation methods, thereby driving the progress of MLLM research.

While text-to-image models like DALLE-3 and Stable Diffusion are rapidly proliferating, they often encounter challenges such as hallucination, bias, and the production of unsafe, low-quality output. To effectively address these issues, it is crucial to align these models with desired behaviors based on feedback from a multimodal judge. Despite their significance, current multimodal judges frequently undergo inadequate evaluation of their capabilities and limitations, potentially leading to misalignment and unsafe fine-tuning outcomes. To address this issue, we introduce MJ-Bench, a novel benchmark which incorporates a comprehensive preference dataset to evaluate multimodal judges in providing feedback for image generation models across four key perspectives: alignment, safety, image quality, and bias. Specifically, we evaluate a large variety of multimodal judges including smaller-sized CLIP-based scoring models, open-source VLMs (e.g. LLaVA family), and close-source VLMs (e.g. GPT-4o, Claude 3) on each decomposed subcategory of our preference dataset. Experiments reveal that close-source VLMs generally provide better feedback, with GPT-4o outperforming other judges in average. Compared with open-source VLMs, smaller-sized scoring models can provide better feedback regarding text-image alignment and image quality, while VLMs provide more accurate feedback regarding safety and generation bias due to their stronger reasoning capabilities. Further studies in feedback scale reveal that VLM judges can generally provide more accurate and stable feedback in natural language (Likert-scale) than numerical scales. Notably, human evaluations on end-to-end fine-tuned models using separate feedback from these multimodal judges provide similar conclusions, further confirming the effectiveness of MJ-Bench. All data, code, models are available at https://huggingface.co/MJ-Bench.

Last year, multimodal architectures served up a revolution in AI-based approaches and solutions, extending the capabilities of large language models (LLM). We propose an OmniFusion model based on a pretrained LLM and adapters for visual modality. We evaluated and compared several architecture design principles for better text and visual data coupling: MLP and transformer adapters, various CLIP ViT-based encoders (SigLIP, InternVIT, etc.), and their fusing approach, image encoding method (whole image or tiles encoding) and two 7B LLMs (the proprietary one and open-source Mistral). Experiments on 8 visual-language benchmarks show the top score for the best OmniFusion setup in terms of different VQA tasks in comparison with open-source LLaVA-like solutions: VizWiz, Pope, MM-Vet, ScienceQA, MMBench, TextVQA, VQAv2, MMMU. We also propose a variety of situations, where OmniFusion provides highly-detailed answers in different domains: housekeeping, sightseeing, culture, medicine, handwritten and scanned equations recognition, etc. Mistral-based OmniFusion model is an open-source solution with weights, training and inference scripts available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/OmniFusion.

MLLMs have been widely studied for video question answering recently. However, most existing assessments focus on natural videos, overlooking synthetic videos, such as AI-generated content (AIGC). Meanwhile, some works in video generation rely on MLLMs to evaluate the quality of generated videos, but the capabilities of MLLMs on interpreting AIGC videos remain largely underexplored. To address this, we propose a new benchmark, VF-Eval, which introduces four tasks-coherence validation, error awareness, error type detection, and reasoning evaluation-to comprehensively evaluate the abilities of MLLMs on AIGC videos. We evaluate 13 frontier MLLMs on VF-Eval and find that even the best-performing model, GPT-4.1, struggles to achieve consistently good performance across all tasks. This highlights the challenging nature of our benchmark. Additionally, to investigate the practical applications of VF-Eval in improving video generation, we conduct an experiment, RePrompt, demonstrating that aligning MLLMs more closely with human feedback can benefit video generation.

Recently, LLM agents have made rapid progress in improving their programming capabilities. However, existing benchmarks lack the ability to automatically evaluate from users' perspective, and also lack the explainability of the results of LLM agents' code generation capabilities. Thus, we introduce ProjectEval, a new benchmark for LLM agents project-level code generation's automated evaluation by simulating user interaction. ProjectEval is constructed by LLM with human reviewing. It has three different level inputs of natural languages or code skeletons. ProjectEval can evaluate the generated projects by user interaction simulation for execution, and by code similarity through existing objective indicators. Through ProjectEval, we find that systematic engineering project code, overall understanding of the project and comprehensive analysis capability are the keys for LLM agents to achieve practical projects. Our findings and benchmark provide valuable insights for developing more effective programming agents that can be deployed in future real-world production.

The visualization community regards visualization literacy as a necessary skill. Yet, despite the recent increase in research into visualization literacy by the education and visualization communities, we lack practical and time-effective instruments for the widespread measurements of people's comprehension and interpretation of visual designs. We present Mini-VLAT, a brief but practical visualization literacy test. The Mini-VLAT is a 12-item short form of the 53-item Visualization Literacy Assessment Test (VLAT). The Mini-VLAT is reliable (coefficient omega = 0.72) and strongly correlates with the VLAT. Five visualization experts validated the Mini-VLAT items, yielding an average content validity ratio (CVR) of 0.6. We further validate Mini-VLAT by demonstrating a strong positive correlation between study participants' Mini-VLAT scores and their aptitude for learning an unfamiliar visualization using a Parallel Coordinate Plot test. Overall, the Mini-VLAT items showed a similar pattern of validity and reliability as the 53-item VLAT. The results show that Mini-VLAT is a psychometrically sound and practical short measure of visualization literacy.

We present VLMEvalKit: an open-source toolkit for evaluating large multi-modality models based on PyTorch. The toolkit aims to provide a user-friendly and comprehensive framework for researchers and developers to evaluate existing multi-modality models and publish reproducible evaluation results. In VLMEvalKit, we implement over 70 different large multi-modality models, including both proprietary APIs and open-source models, as well as more than 20 different multi-modal benchmarks. By implementing a single interface, new models can be easily added to the toolkit, while the toolkit automatically handles the remaining workloads, including data preparation, distributed inference, prediction post-processing, and metric calculation. Although the toolkit is currently mainly used for evaluating large vision-language models, its design is compatible with future updates that incorporate additional modalities, such as audio and video. Based on the evaluation results obtained with the toolkit, we host OpenVLM Leaderboard, a comprehensive leaderboard to track the progress of multi-modality learning research. The toolkit is released at https://github.com/open-compass/VLMEvalKit and is actively maintained.

This research introduces the Bi-VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model, a novel system designed for bimanual robotic dexterous manipulations that seamlessly integrate vision, language understanding, and physical action. The system's functionality was evaluated through a set of household tasks, including the preparation of a desired salad upon human request. Bi-VLA demonstrates the ability to interpret complex human instructions, perceive and understand the visual context of ingredients, and execute precise bimanual actions to assemble the requested salad. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate the system's performance in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability to various salad recipes and human preferences. Our results indicate a high success rate of 100% in generating the correct executable code by the Language module from the user-requested tasks. The Vision Module achieved a success rate of 96.06% in detecting specific ingredients and an 83.4% success rate in detecting a list of multiple ingredients.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a next-generation paradigm for robotics. We introduce dVLA, a diffusion-based VLA that leverages a multimodal chain-of-thought to unify visual perception, language reasoning, and robotic control in a single system. dVLA jointly optimizes perception, language understanding, and action under a single diffusion objective, enabling stronger cross-modal reasoning and better generalization to novel instructions and objects. For practical deployment, we mitigate inference latency by incorporating two acceleration strategies, a prefix attention mask and KV caching, yielding up to around times speedup at test-time inference. We evaluate dVLA in both simulation and the real world: on the LIBERO benchmark, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 96.4% average success rate, consistently surpassing both discrete and continuous action policies; on a real Franka robot, it succeeds across a diverse task suite, including a challenging bin-picking task that requires multi-step planning, demonstrating robust real-world performance. Together, these results underscore the promise of unified diffusion frameworks for practical, high-performance VLA robotics.

Evaluation benchmarks are the cornerstone of measuring capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as well as driving progress in said capabilities. Originally designed to make claims about capabilities (or lack thereof) in fully pretrained models, evaluation benchmarks are now also extensively used to decide between various training choices. Despite this widespread usage, we rarely quantify the variance in our evaluation benchmarks, which dictates whether differences in performance are meaningful. Here, we define and measure a range of metrics geared towards measuring variance in evaluation benchmarks, including seed variance across initialisations, and monotonicity during training. By studying a large number of models -- both openly available and pretrained from scratch -- we provide empirical estimates for a variety of variance metrics, with considerations and recommendations for practitioners. We also evaluate the utility and tradeoffs of continuous versus discrete performance measures and explore options for better understanding and reducing this variance. We find that simple changes, such as framing choice tasks (like MMLU) as completion tasks, can often reduce variance for smaller scale (sim7B) models, while more involved methods inspired from human testing literature (such as item analysis and item response theory) struggle to meaningfully reduce variance. Overall, our work provides insights into variance in evaluation benchmarks, suggests LM-specific techniques to reduce variance, and more generally encourages practitioners to carefully factor in variance when comparing models.

Evaluation of language model outputs on structured writing tasks is typically conducted with a number of desirable criteria presented to human evaluators or large language models (LLMs). For instance, on a prompt like "Help me draft an academic talk on coffee intake vs research productivity", a model response may be evaluated for criteria like accuracy and coherence. However, high-quality responses should do more than just satisfy basic task requirements. An effective response to this query should include quintessential features of an academic talk, such as a compelling opening, clear research questions, and a takeaway. To help identify these implicit criteria, we introduce EvalAgent, a novel framework designed to automatically uncover nuanced and task-specific criteria. EvalAgent first mines expert-authored online guidance. It then uses this evidence to propose diverse, long-tail evaluation criteria that are grounded in reliable external sources. Our experiments demonstrate that the grounded criteria produced by EvalAgent are often implicit (not directly stated in the user's prompt), yet specific (high degree of lexical precision). Further, EvalAgent criteria are often not satisfied by initial responses but they are actionable, such that responses can be refined to satisfy them. Finally, we show that combining LLM-generated and EvalAgent criteria uncovers more human-valued criteria than using LLMs alone.

Large language models (LLMs) garner significant attention for their unprecedented performance, leading to an increasing number of researches evaluating LLMs. However, these evaluation benchmarks are limited to assessing the instruction-following capabilities, overlooking the fundamental abilities that emerge during the pre-training stage. Previous subjective evaluation methods mainly reply on scoring by API models. However, in the absence of references, large models have shown limited ability to discern subtle differences. To bridge the gap, we propose F-Eval, a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities, including expression, commonsense and logic. The tasks in F-Eval include multi-choice objective tasks, open-ended objective tasks, reference-based subjective tasks and reference-free subjective tasks. For reference-free subjective tasks, we devise new evaluation methods, serving as alternatives to scoring by API models. We conduct evaluations on 13 advanced LLMs. Results show that our evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. Additionally, we discuss the influence of different model sizes, dimensions, and normalization methods. We anticipate that F-Eval will facilitate the study of LLMs' fundamental abilities.

We introduce TestCase-Eval, a new benchmark for systematic evaluation of LLMs in test-case generation. TestCase-Eval includes 500 algorithm problems and 100,000 human-crafted solutions from the Codeforces platform. It focuses on two pivotal tasks: (1) Fault Coverage, which measures how well LLM-generated test sets probe diverse input scenarios and cover a wide range of potential failure modes. (2) Fault Exposure, which evaluates whether LLMs can craft a tailored test input that reveals a specific incorrect code implementation. We provide a comprehensive assessment of 19 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs on TestCase-Eval, offering insights into their strengths and limitations in generating effective test cases for algorithm problems.

We introduce CheckEval, a novel evaluation framework using Large Language Models, addressing the challenges of ambiguity and inconsistency in current evaluation methods. CheckEval addresses these challenges by dividing evaluation criteria into detailed sub-aspects and constructing a checklist of Boolean questions for each, simplifying the evaluation. This approach not only renders the process more interpretable but also significantly enhances the robustness and reliability of results by focusing on specific evaluation dimensions. Validated through a focused case study using the SummEval benchmark, CheckEval indicates a strong correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it demonstrates a highly consistent Inter-Annotator Agreement. These findings highlight the effectiveness of CheckEval for objective, flexible, and precise evaluations. By offering a customizable and interactive framework, CheckEval sets a new standard for the use of LLMs in evaluation, responding to the evolving needs of the field and establishing a clear method for future LLM-based evaluation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. The performance of VLA models can be improved by integrating with action chunking, a critical technique for effective control. However, action chunking linearly scales up action dimensions in VLA models with increased chunking sizes. This reduces the inference efficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose PD-VLA, the first parallel decoding framework for VLA models integrated with action chunking. Our framework reformulates autoregressive decoding as a nonlinear system solved by parallel fixed-point iterations. This approach preserves model performance with mathematical guarantees while significantly improving decoding speed. In addition, it enables training-free acceleration without architectural changes, as well as seamless synergy with existing acceleration techniques. Extensive simulations validate that our PD-VLA maintains competitive success rates while achieving 2.52 times execution frequency on manipulators (with 7 degrees of freedom) compared with the fundamental VLA model. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the most effective settings for acceleration. Finally, real-world experiments validate its high applicability across different tasks.

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) remain vulnerable to malicious prompts that induce harmful outputs. Existing safety benchmarks for VLMs primarily rely on automated evaluation methods, but these methods struggle to detect implicit harmful content or produce inaccurate evaluations. Therefore, we found that existing benchmarks have low levels of harmfulness, ambiguous data, and limited diversity in image-text pair combinations. To address these issues, we propose the ELITE benchmark, a high-quality safety evaluation benchmark for VLMs, underpinned by our enhanced evaluation method, the ELITE evaluator. The ELITE evaluator explicitly incorporates a toxicity score to accurately assess harmfulness in multimodal contexts, where VLMs often provide specific, convincing, but unharmful descriptions of images. We filter out ambiguous and low-quality image-text pairs from existing benchmarks using the ELITE evaluator and generate diverse combinations of safe and unsafe image-text pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that the ELITE evaluator achieves superior alignment with human evaluations compared to prior automated methods, and the ELITE benchmark offers enhanced benchmark quality and diversity. By introducing ELITE, we pave the way for safer, more robust VLMs, contributing essential tools for evaluating and mitigating safety risks in real-world applications.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate multimodal content, including presentation slides, yet their slide-specific understanding remains underexplored {despite their growing role as critics in agentic, model-forward pipelines}. We introduce VLM-SlideEval, an evaluation framework that probes VLMs along three axes: (1) element-level extraction from slide images aligned to ground truth; (2) robustness to controlled perturbations in geometry, style, and text; and (3) higher-level comprehension, such as recovering a deck's narrative order from shuffled slides. Using publicly available decks from Zenodo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Forceless/Zenodo10K/viewer/default/pptx), we standardize ground-truth element metadata from PowerPoint XML and live renderings into a unified, verifiable schema. Empirically, VLMs underperform on pixel-accurate extraction and show non-trivial agreement, fidelity, and consistency under controlled perturbations, while performing better on single-slide content understanding; however, they do not reliably capture narrative structure across slides. These results highlight the limits of current VLMs for slide evaluation and motivate calibrated, critic-in-the-loop evaluators that drive iterative refinement and selection in agentic pipelines.

The paradigm of LLM-as-a-judge is emerging as a scalable and efficient alternative to human evaluation, demonstrating strong performance on well-defined tasks. However, its reliability in open-ended tasks with dynamic environments and complex interactions remains unexplored. To bridge the gap, we introduce WebDevJudge, a systematic benchmark for assessing LLM-as-a-judge performance in web development, with support for both non-interactive evaluation based on static observations and continuous interactive evaluation with a dynamic web environment. WebDevJudge comprises human preference labels over paired web implementations, annotated with structured and query-grounded rubrics to ensure high-quality ground truth. Using this benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate various evaluators, including LLMs, MLLMs, and agentic workflows. We systematically investigate the impact of different paradigms and guidance mechanisms. Our experiments reveal a significant gap between LLM judges and human experts. In-depth analysis indicates this gap stems from fundamental model limitations, including failures in recognizing functional equivalence, verifying task feasibility, and mitigating bias. Overall, WebDevJudge presents a significant challenge to LLM-as-a-judge, offering insights to guide future research toward developing more reliable and capable automated evaluators for complicated scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/lcy2723/WebDevJudge.

We introduce AbGen, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in designing ablation studies for scientific research. AbGen consists of 1,500 expert-annotated examples derived from 807 NLP papers. In this benchmark, LLMs are tasked with generating detailed ablation study designs for a specified module or process based on the given research context. Our evaluation of leading LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1-0528 and o4-mini, highlights a significant performance gap between these models and human experts in terms of the importance, faithfulness, and soundness of the ablation study designs. Moreover, we demonstrate that current automated evaluation methods are not reliable for our task, as they show a significant discrepancy when compared to human assessment. To better investigate this, we develop AbGen-Eval, a meta-evaluation benchmark designed to assess the reliability of commonly used automated evaluation systems in measuring LLM performance on our task. We investigate various LLM-as-Judge systems on AbGen-Eval, providing insights for future research on developing more effective and reliable LLM-based evaluation systems for complex scientific tasks.

Image captioning has been a longstanding challenge in vision-language research. With the rise of LLMs, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) generate detailed and comprehensive image descriptions. However, benchmarking the quality of such captions remains unresolved. This paper addresses two key questions: (1) How well do current VLMs actually perform on image captioning, particularly compared to humans? We built CapArena, a platform with over 6000 pairwise caption battles and high-quality human preference votes. Our arena-style evaluation marks a milestone, showing that leading models like GPT-4o achieve or even surpass human performance, while most open-source models lag behind. (2) Can automated metrics reliably assess detailed caption quality? Using human annotations from CapArena, we evaluate traditional and recent captioning metrics, as well as VLM-as-a-Judge. Our analysis reveals that while some metrics (e.g., METEOR) show decent caption-level agreement with humans, their systematic biases lead to inconsistencies in model ranking. In contrast, VLM-as-a-Judge demonstrates robust discernment at both the caption and model levels. Building on these insights, we release CapArena-Auto, an accurate and efficient automated benchmark for detailed captioning, achieving 94.3% correlation with human rankings at just $4 per test. Data and resources will be open-sourced at https://caparena.github.io.

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BridgeVLA, a novel 3D VLA model that (1) projects 3D inputs to multiple 2D images, ensuring input alignment with the VLM backbone, and (2) utilizes 2D heatmaps for action prediction, unifying the input and output spaces within a consistent 2D image space. In addition, we propose a scalable pre-training method that equips the VLM backbone with the capability to predict 2D heatmaps before downstream policy learning. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is able to learn 3D manipulation efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81.4% to 88.2%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56.7% to 64.0%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 96.8% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, highlighting its extraordinary sample efficiency. Project Website:https://bridgevla.github.io/

In this work, we discuss evaluating video foundation models in a fair and robust manner. Unlike language or image foundation models, many video foundation models are evaluated with differing parameters (such as sampling rate, number of frames, pretraining steps, etc.), making fair and robust comparisons challenging. Therefore, we present a carefully designed evaluation framework for measuring two core capabilities of video comprehension: appearance and motion understanding. Our findings reveal that existing video foundation models, whether text-supervised like UMT or InternVideo2, or self-supervised like V-JEPA, exhibit limitations in at least one of these capabilities. As an alternative, we introduce TWLV-I, a new video foundation model that constructs robust visual representations for both motion- and appearance-based videos. Based on the average top-1 accuracy of linear probing on five action recognition benchmarks, pretrained only on publicly accessible datasets, our model shows a 4.6%p improvement compared to V-JEPA (ViT-L) and a 7.7%p improvement compared to UMT (ViT-L). Even when compared to much larger models, our model demonstrates a 7.2%p improvement compared to DFN (ViT-H), a 2.7%p improvement compared to V-JEPA~(ViT-H) and a 2.8%p improvement compared to InternVideo2 (ViT-g). We provide embedding vectors obtained by TWLV-I from videos of several commonly used video benchmarks, along with evaluation source code that can directly utilize these embeddings. The code is available on "https://github.com/twelvelabs-io/video-embeddings-evaluation-framework".

We introduce RIPT-VLA, a simple and scalable reinforcement-learning-based interactive post-training paradigm that fine-tunes pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using only sparse binary success rewards. Existing VLA training pipelines rely heavily on offline expert demonstration data and supervised imitation, limiting their ability to adapt to new tasks and environments under low-data regimes. RIPT-VLA addresses this by enabling interactive post-training with a stable policy optimization algorithm based on dynamic rollout sampling and leave-one-out advantage estimation. RIPT-VLA has the following characteristics. First, it applies to various VLA models, resulting in an improvement on the lightweight QueST model by 21.2%, and the 7B OpenVLA-OFT model to an unprecedented 97.5% success rate. Second, it is computationally efficient and data-efficient: with only one demonstration, RIPT-VLA enables an unworkable SFT model (4%) to succeed with a 97% success rate within 15 iterations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the policy learned by RIPT-VLA generalizes across different tasks and scenarios and is robust to the initial state context. These results highlight RIPT-VLA as a practical and effective paradigm for post-training VLA models through minimal supervision.

Developing efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies is crucial for practical robotics deployment, yet current approaches face prohibitive computational costs and resource requirements. Existing diffusion-based VLA policies require multi-billion-parameter models and massive datasets to achieve strong performance. We tackle this efficiency challenge with two contributions: intermediate-modality fusion, which reallocates capacity to the diffusion head by pruning up to 50% of LLM layers, and action-specific Global-AdaLN conditioning, which cuts parameters by 20% through modular adaptation. We integrate these advances into a novel 950 M-parameter VLA called FLOWER. Pretrained in just 200 H100 GPU hours, FLOWER delivers competitive performance with bigger VLAs across 190 tasks spanning ten simulation and real-world benchmarks and demonstrates robustness across diverse robotic embodiments. In addition, FLOWER achieves a new SoTA of 4.53 on the CALVIN ABC benchmark. Demos, code and pretrained weights are available at https://intuitive-robots.github.io/flower_vla/.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs 10 times larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar. The project is released at: https://github.com/SparksJoe/Prism.

Instruction-based image editing has advanced rapidly, yet reliable and interpretable evaluation remains a bottleneck. Current protocols either (i) depend on paired reference images -- resulting in limited coverage and inheriting biases from prior generative models -- or (ii) rely solely on zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs), whose prompt-based assessments of instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality are often imprecise. To address this, we introduce EdiVal-Agent, an automated, scalable, and fine-grained evaluation framework for multi-turn instruction-based editing from an object-centric perspective, supported by a suite of expert tools. Given an image, EdiVal-Agent first decomposes it into semantically meaningful objects, then synthesizes diverse, context-aware editing instructions. For evaluation, it integrates VLMs with open-vocabulary object detectors to assess instruction following, uses semantic-level feature extractors to evaluate content consistency, and leverages human preference models to judge visual quality. We show that combining VLMs with object detectors yields stronger agreement with human judgments in instruction-following evaluation compared to using VLMs alone and CLIP-based metrics. Furthermore, the pipeline's modular design allows future tools to be seamlessly integrated, enhancing evaluation accuracy over time. Instantiating this pipeline, we build EdiVal-Bench, a multi-turn editing benchmark covering 9 instruction types and 11 state-of-the-art editing models spanning autoregressive (AR) (including Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1), flow-matching, and diffusion paradigms. We demonstrate that EdiVal-Agent can be used to identify existing failure modes, thereby informing the development of the next generation of editing models. Project page: https://tianyucodings.github.io/EdiVAL-page/.

With nearly 1.5 billion people and more than 120 major languages, India represents one of the most diverse regions in the world. As multilingual Vision-Language Models (VLMs) gain prominence, robust evaluation methodologies are essential to drive progress toward equitable AI for low-resource languages. Current multilingual VLM evaluations suffer from four major limitations: reliance on unverified auto-translations, narrow task/domain coverage, limited sample sizes, and lack of cultural and natively sourced Question-Answering (QA). To address these gaps, we present a scalable framework to evaluate VLMs in Indian languages and compare it with performance in English. Using the framework, we generate HinTel-AlignBench, a benchmark that draws from diverse sources in Hindi and Telugu with English-aligned samples. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a semi-automated dataset creation framework combining back-translation, filtering, and human verification; (2) the most comprehensive vision-language benchmark for Hindi and and Telugu, including adapted English datasets (VQAv2, RealWorldQA, CLEVR-Math) and native novel Indic datasets (JEE for STEM, VAANI for cultural grounding) with approximately 4,000 QA pairs per language; and (3) a detailed performance analysis of various State-of-the-Art (SOTA) open-weight and closed-source VLMs. We find a regression in performance for tasks in English versus in Indian languages for 4 out of 5 tasks across all the models, with an average regression of 8.3 points in Hindi and 5.5 points for Telugu. We categorize common failure modes to highlight concrete areas of improvement in multilingual multimodal understanding.

Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However, understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts, such as attributes and inter-object relationships, remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity, their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect, neglecting the visual dimension. Here, we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine, we carefully design a benchmark, SPEC, to diagnose the comprehension of object size, position, existence, and count. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly, their performance is close to random guess, revealing significant limitations. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding, achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements, further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at general vision-language tasks, visuospatial cognition - reasoning about spatial layouts, relations, and dynamics - remains a significant challenge. Existing models often lack the necessary architectural components and specialized training data for fine-grained spatial understanding. We introduce ViCA2 (Visuospatial Cognitive Assistant 2), a novel MLLM designed to enhance spatial reasoning. ViCA2 features a dual vision encoder architecture integrating SigLIP for semantics and Hiera for spatial structure, coupled with a token ratio control mechanism for efficiency. We also developed ViCA-322K, a new large-scale dataset with over 322,000 spatially grounded question-answer pairs for targeted instruction tuning. On the challenging VSI-Bench benchmark, our ViCA2-7B model achieves a state-of-the-art average score of 56.8, significantly surpassing larger open-source models (e.g., LLaVA-NeXT-Video-72B, 40.9) and leading proprietary models (Gemini-1.5 Pro, 45.4). This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in achieving strong visuospatial intelligence with a compact model. We release ViCA2, its codebase, and the ViCA-322K dataset to facilitate further research.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems. We released the challenge on the Codalab evaluation system for further research.

The increasing application of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) across various sectors have spotlighted the essence of their output reliability and accuracy, particularly their ability to produce content grounded in factual information (e.g. common and domain-specific knowledge). In this work, we introduce SimpleVQA, the first comprehensive multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the factuality ability of MLLMs to answer natural language short questions. SimpleVQA is characterized by six key features: it covers multiple tasks and multiple scenarios, ensures high quality and challenging queries, maintains static and timeless reference answers, and is straightforward to evaluate. Our approach involves categorizing visual question-answering items into 9 different tasks around objective events or common knowledge and situating these within 9 topics. Rigorous quality control processes are implemented to guarantee high-quality, concise, and clear answers, facilitating evaluation with minimal variance via an LLM-as-a-judge scoring system. Using SimpleVQA, we perform a comprehensive assessment of leading 18 MLLMs and 8 text-only LLMs, delving into their image comprehension and text generation abilities by identifying and analyzing error cases.

The automatic generation of visualizations is an old task that, through the years, has shown more and more interest from the research and practitioner communities. Recently, large language models (LLM) have become an interesting option for supporting generative tasks related to visualization, demonstrating initial promising results. At the same time, several pitfalls, like the multiple ways of instructing an LLM to generate the desired result, the different perspectives leading the generation (code-based, image-based, grammar-based), and the presence of hallucinations even for the visualization generation task, make their usage less affordable than expected. Following similar initiatives for benchmarking LLMs, this paper copes with the problem of modeling the evaluation of a generated visualization through an LLM. We propose a theoretical evaluation stack, EvaLLM, that decomposes the evaluation effort in its atomic components, characterizes their nature, and provides an overview of how to implement and interpret them. We also designed and implemented an evaluation platform that provides a benchmarking resource for the visualization generation task. The platform supports automatic and manual scoring conducted by multiple assessors to support a fine-grained and semantic evaluation based on the EvaLLM stack. Two case studies on GPT3.5-turbo with Code Interpreter and Llama2-70-b models show the benefits of EvaLLM and illustrate interesting results on the current state-of-the-art LLM-generated visualizations.

Vision-language generative reward models (VL-GenRMs) play a crucial role in aligning and evaluating multimodal AI systems, yet their own evaluation remains under-explored. Current assessment methods primarily rely on AI-annotated preference labels from traditional VL tasks, which can introduce biases and often fail to effectively challenge state-of-the-art models. To address these limitations, we introduce VL-RewardBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning general multimodal queries, visual hallucination detection, and complex reasoning tasks. Through our AI-assisted annotation pipeline combining sample selection with human verification, we curate 1,250 high-quality examples specifically designed to probe model limitations. Comprehensive evaluation across 16 leading large vision-language models, demonstrates VL-RewardBench's effectiveness as a challenging testbed, where even GPT-4o achieves only 65.4% accuracy, and state-of-the-art open-source models such as Qwen2-VL-72B, struggle to surpass random-guessing. Importantly, performance on VL-RewardBench strongly correlates (Pearson's r > 0.9) with MMMU-Pro accuracy using Best-of-N sampling with VL-GenRMs. Analysis experiments uncover three critical insights for improving VL-GenRMs: (i) models predominantly fail at basic visual perception tasks rather than reasoning tasks; (ii) inference-time scaling benefits vary dramatically by model capacity; and (iii) training VL-GenRMs to learn to judge substantially boosts judgment capability (+14.7% accuracy for a 7B VL-GenRM). We believe VL-RewardBench along with the experimental insights will become a valuable resource for advancing VL-GenRMs.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are driving a revolution in robotics, enabling machines to understand instructions and interact with the physical world. This field is exploding with new models and datasets, making it both exciting and challenging to keep pace with. This survey offers a clear and structured guide to the VLA landscape. We design it to follow the natural learning path of a researcher: we start with the basic Modules of any VLA model, trace the history through key Milestones, and then dive deep into the core Challenges that define recent research frontier. Our main contribution is a detailed breakdown of the five biggest challenges in: (1) Representation, (2) Execution, (3) Generalization, (4) Safety, and (5) Dataset and Evaluation. This structure mirrors the developmental roadmap of a generalist agent: establishing the fundamental perception-action loop, scaling capabilities across diverse embodiments and environments, and finally ensuring trustworthy deployment-all supported by the essential data infrastructure. For each of them, we review existing approaches and highlight future opportunities. We position this paper as both a foundational guide for newcomers and a strategic roadmap for experienced researchers, with the dual aim of accelerating learning and inspiring new ideas in embodied intelligence. A live version of this survey, with continuous updates, is maintained on our https://suyuz1.github.io/Survery/{project page}.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is a complex task, especially considering the intricacies of natural language understanding and the expectations for high-level reasoning. Traditional evaluations typically lean on human-based, model-based, or automatic-metrics-based paradigms, each with its own advantages and shortcomings. We introduce "Fusion-Eval", a system that employs LLMs not solely for direct evaluations, but to skillfully integrate insights from diverse evaluators. This gives Fusion-Eval flexibility, enabling it to work effectively across diverse tasks and make optimal use of multiple references. In testing on the SummEval dataset, Fusion-Eval achieved a Spearman correlation of 0.96, outperforming other evaluators. The success of Fusion-Eval underscores the potential of LLMs to produce evaluations that closely align human perspectives, setting a new standard in the field of LLM evaluation.

When we look around and perform complex tasks, how we see and selectively process what we see is crucial. However, the lack of this visual search mechanism in current multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) hinders their ability to focus on important visual details, especially when handling high-resolution and visually crowded images. To address this, we introduce V*, an LLM-guided visual search mechanism that employs the world knowledge in LLMs for efficient visual querying. When combined with an MLLM, this mechanism enhances collaborative reasoning, contextual understanding, and precise targeting of specific visual elements. This integration results in a new MLLM meta-architecture, named Show, sEArch, and TelL (SEAL). We further create V*Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in their ability to process high-resolution images and focus on visual details. Our study highlights the necessity of incorporating visual search capabilities into multimodal systems. The code is available https://github.com/penghao-wu/vstar.

Ultrasound imaging has become the preferred imaging modality for early cancer screening due to its advantages of non-ionizing radiation, low cost, and real-time imaging capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnosis heavily relies on physician expertise, presenting challenges of high subjectivity and low diagnostic efficiency. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising solutions for this issue, but existing general-purpose models demonstrate limited knowledge in ultrasound medical tasks, with poor generalization in multi-organ lesion recognition and low efficiency across multi-task diagnostics. To address these limitations, we propose EchoVLM, a vision-language model specifically designed for ultrasound medical imaging. The model employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture trained on data spanning seven anatomical regions. This design enables the model to perform multiple tasks, including ultrasound report generation, diagnosis and visual question-answering (VQA). The experimental results demonstrated that EchoVLM achieved significant improvements of 10.15 and 4.77 points in BLEU-1 scores and ROUGE-1 scores respectively compared to Qwen2-VL on the ultrasound report generation task. These findings suggest that EchoVLM has substantial potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy in ultrasound imaging, thereby providing a viable technical solution for future clinical applications. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Asunatan/EchoVLM.

With video games now generating the highest revenues in the entertainment industry, optimizing game development workflows has become essential for the sector's sustained growth. Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer considerable potential to automate and enhance various aspects of game development, particularly Quality Assurance (QA), which remains one of the industry's most labor-intensive processes with limited automation options. To accurately evaluate the performance of VLMs in video game QA tasks and determine their effectiveness in handling real-world scenarios, there is a clear need for standardized benchmarks, as existing benchmarks are insufficient to address the specific requirements of this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoGameQA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that covers a wide array of game QA activities, including visual unit testing, visual regression testing, needle-in-a-haystack tasks, glitch detection, and bug report generation for both images and videos of various games. Code and data are available at: https://asgaardlab.github.io/videogameqa-bench/

In question-answering scenarios, humans can assess whether the available information is sufficient and seek additional information if necessary, rather than providing a forced answer. In contrast, Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically generate direct, one-shot responses without evaluating the sufficiency of the information. To investigate this gap, we identify a critical and challenging task in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) scenario: can VLMs indicate how to adjust an image when the visual information is insufficient to answer a question? This capability is especially valuable for assisting visually impaired individuals who often need guidance to capture images correctly. To evaluate this capability of current VLMs, we introduce a human-labeled dataset as a benchmark for this task. Additionally, we present an automated framework that generates synthetic training data by simulating ``where to know'' scenarios. Our empirical results show significant performance improvements in mainstream VLMs when fine-tuned with this synthetic data. This study demonstrates the potential to narrow the gap between information assessment and acquisition in VLMs, bringing their performance closer to humans.

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as clinical assistants across various medical fields. However, specialized dermatology VLM capable of delivering professional and detailed diagnostic analysis remains underdeveloped, primarily due to less specialized text descriptions in current dermatology multimodal datasets. To address this issue, we propose MM-Skin, the first large-scale multimodal dermatology dataset that encompasses 3 imaging modalities, including clinical, dermoscopic, and pathological and nearly 10k high-quality image-text pairs collected from professional textbooks. In addition, we generate over 27k diverse, instruction-following vision question answering (VQA) samples (9 times the size of current largest dermatology VQA dataset). Leveraging public datasets and MM-Skin, we developed SkinVL, a dermatology-specific VLM designed for precise and nuanced skin disease interpretation. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations of SkinVL on VQA, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and zero-shot classification tasks across 8 datasets, reveal its exceptional performance for skin diseases in comparison to both general and medical VLM models. The introduction of MM-Skin and SkinVL offers a meaningful contribution to advancing the development of clinical dermatology VLM assistants. MM-Skin is available at https://github.com/ZwQ803/MM-Skin

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are now claiming remarkable supported context lengths of 256k or even more. In contrast, the average context lengths of mainstream benchmarks are insufficient (5k-21k), and they suffer from potential knowledge leakage and inaccurate metrics, resulting in biased evaluation. This paper introduces LV-Eval, a challenging long-context benchmark with five length levels (16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, and 256k) reaching up to 256k words. LV-Eval features two main tasks, single-hop QA and multi-hop QA, comprising 11 bilingual datasets. The design of LV-Eval has incorporated three key techniques, namely confusing facts insertion, keyword and phrase replacement, and keyword-recall-based metric design. The advantages of LV-Eval include controllable evaluation across different context lengths, challenging test instances with confusing facts, mitigated knowledge leakage, and more objective evaluations. We evaluate 10 LLMs on LV-Eval and conduct ablation studies on the techniques used in LV-Eval construction. The results reveal that: (i) Commercial LLMs generally outperform open-source LLMs when evaluated within length levels shorter than their claimed context length. However, their overall performance is surpassed by open-source LLMs with longer context lengths. (ii) Extremely long-context LLMs, such as Yi-6B-200k, exhibit a relatively gentle degradation of performance, but their absolute performances may not necessarily be higher than those of LLMs with shorter context lengths. (iii) LLMs' performances can significantly degrade in the presence of confusing information, especially in the pressure test of "needle in a haystack". (iv) Issues related to knowledge leakage and inaccurate metrics introduce bias in evaluation, and these concerns are alleviated in LV-Eval. All datasets and evaluation codes are released at: https://github.com/infinigence/LVEval.

Recent studies have successfully integrated large vision-language models (VLMs) into low-level robotic control by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with expert robotic datasets, resulting in what we term vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although the VLA models are powerful, how to improve these large models during interaction with environments remains an open question. In this paper, we explore how to further improve these VLA models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), a commonly used fine-tuning technique for large models. However, we find that directly applying online RL to large VLA models presents significant challenges, including training instability that severely impacts the performance of large models, and computing burdens that exceed the capabilities of most local machines. To address these challenges, we propose iRe-VLA framework, which iterates between Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning to effectively improve VLA models, leveraging the exploratory benefits of RL while maintaining the stability of supervised learning. Experiments in two simulated benchmarks and a real-world manipulation suite validate the effectiveness of our method.

Developing 3D-VL generalists capable of understanding 3D scenes and following natural language instructions to perform a wide range of tasks has been a long-standing goal in the 3D-VL community. Despite recent progress, 3D-VL models still lag behind their 2D counterparts in capability and robustness, falling short of the generalist standard. A key obstacle to developing 3D-VL generalists lies in data scalability, hindered by the lack of an efficient scene representation. We propose LEO-VL, a 3D-VL model built upon condensed feature grid (CFG), an efficient scene representation that bridges 2D perception and 3D spatial structure while significantly reducing token overhead. This efficiency unlocks large-scale training towards 3D-VL generalist, for which we curate over 700k high-quality 3D-VL data spanning four domains of real-world indoor scenes and five tasks such as captioning and dialogue. LEO-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of 3D QA benchmarks, including SQA3D, MSQA, and Beacon3D. Ablation studies confirm the efficiency of our representation, the importance of task and scene diversity, and the validity of our data curation principle. Furthermore, we introduce SceneDPO, a novel post-training objective that enhances the robustness of 3D-VL models. We hope our findings contribute to the advancement of scalable and robust 3D-VL generalists.

Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: zero prediction, visual fine-tuning, and text prompt, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.