villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models

Xiaoyu Chen, Hangxing Wei, Pushi, Chuheng Zhang, Kaixin Wang, Yanjiang Guo, Rushuai Yang, Yucen Wang, Xinquan Xiao, Li Zhao, Jianyu Chen, Jiang Bian

villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models: 24 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #6 of 16 papers on 2025-08-01. Day-by-day upvote history.

Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a popular paradigm for learning robot manipulation policies that can follow language instructions and generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work has begun to explore the incorporation of latent actions, an abstract representation of visual change between two frames, into VLA pre-training. In this paper, we introduce villa-X, a novel Visual-Language-Latent-Action (ViLLA) framework that advances latent action modeling for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. Our approach improves both how latent actions are learned and how they are incorporated into VLA pre-training. Together, these contributions enable villa-X to achieve superior performance across simulated environments including SIMPLER and LIBERO, as well as on two real-world robot setups including gripper and dexterous hand manipulation. We believe the ViLLA paradigm holds significant promise, and that our villa-X provides a strong foundation for future research.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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