Zibin Dong
Publications
G0.5: One Autoregressive Stream for Robot Reasoning and Action
The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert. This makes the VLM a context encoder rather than a decision-maker. We introduce G0.5, a pretrained autoregressive VLA in which a single transformer decoder emits reasoning and action tokens under a single objective. Three components make this tractable at foundation-model scale: a learnable cross-embodiment action tokenizer that maps heterogeneous robot actions into a shared vocabulary; a native chain-of-thought stream interleaving task decomposition, object grounding, and action hints with action tokens; and a visual memory module that injects multi-second history through the vision encoder. Because reasoning and action share a single set of weights, the pretrained VLM's capabilities carry over to physical behavior: the model follows instructions closely, and prompts directly steer action granularity, task horizon, and out-of-distribution scene handling without further training. Pretrained on a large collection of robot datasets together with VQA samples, G0.5 surpasses state-of-the-art models across 7 independent regimes: real-world fine-tuning on R1lite and R1pro robots (76.7\% vs.\ 53.3\% for $π_{0.5}$ and 24.4\% for GR00T-N1.7), the 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge on 50 long-horizon household mobile manipulation tasks using a generalist policy (31.4\% vs.\ 26.3\% for $π_{0.5}$ and 26.1\% for the challenge winner), DROID post-training followed by zero-shot transfer to an unseen environment and objects (82.5\%), a language-following Pick-and-Place benchmark, LIBERO (98.9\%), RoboTwin 2.0 (93.3\%), and SimplerEnv-Bridge (87.3\%).
Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?
World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for embodied control because they explicitly model how visual observations may evolve under action. Most existing WAMs follow an imagine-then-execute paradigm, incurring substantial test-time latency from iterative video denoising, yet it remains unclear whether explicit future imagination is actually necessary for strong action performance. In this paper, we ask whether WAMs need explicit future imagination at test time, or whether their benefit comes primarily from video modeling during training. We disentangle the role of video modeling during training from explicit future generation during inference by proposing \textbf{Fast-WAM}, a WAM architecture that retains video co-training during training but skips future prediction at test time. We further instantiate several Fast-WAM variants to enable a controlled comparison of these two factors. Across these variants, we find that Fast-WAM remains competitive with imagine-then-execute variants, while removing video co-training causes a much larger performance drop. Empirically, Fast-WAM achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods both on simulation benchmarks (LIBERO and RoboTwin) and real-world tasks, without embodied pretraining. It runs in real time with 190ms latency, over 4$\times$ faster than existing imagine-then-execute WAMs. These results suggest that the main value of video prediction in WAMs may lie in improving world representations during training rather than generating future observations at test time. Project page: https://yuantianyuan01.github.io/FastWAM/
ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leveraging the native autoregressive paradigm of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated superior instruction-following and training efficiency. Central to this paradigm is action tokenization, yet its design has primarily focused on reconstruction fidelity, failing to address its direct impact on VLA optimization. Consequently, the fundamental question of \textit{what makes for good action tokenizers} remains unanswered. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing design principles specifically from the perspective of VLA optimization. We identify a set of best practices based on information-theoretic insights, including maximized temporal token overlap, minimized vocabulary redundancy, enhanced multimodal mutual information, and token independence. Guided by these principles, we introduce \textbf{ActionCodec}, a high-performance action tokenizer that significantly enhances both training efficiency and VLA performance across diverse simulation and real-world benchmarks. Notably, on LIBERO, a SmolVLM2-2.2B fine-tuned with ActionCodec achieves a 95.5\% success rate without any robotics pre-training. With advanced architectural enhancements, this reaches 97.4\%, representing a new SOTA for VLA models without robotics pre-training. We believe our established design principles, alongside the released model, will provide a clear roadmap for the community to develop more effective action tokenizers.