Core Insights - The article discusses the rapid growth and significance of the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) field, highlighting its potential to enable robots to understand human language, perceive the world, and perform tasks effectively [5][6]. Definition and Standards - VLA models must utilize a pre-trained backbone on large-scale visual-language data to qualify as VLA, emphasizing the importance of language understanding, visual generalization, and task transfer capabilities [7][8]. - Models that merely combine separate visual and text encoders are classified as "Multimodal Policies," while Large Behavior Models (LBMs) refer to strategies trained on extensive robot demonstration data [10][12]. Trends in VLA - **Trend 1: Efficient Architecture Paradigms** The emergence of discrete diffusion models allows for parallel generation of action sequences, improving efficiency and performance [14][16]. - **Trend 2: Embodied Chain-of-Thought (ECoT)** ECoT enhances robot intelligence by enabling them to generate intermediate reasoning steps before executing actions, improving planning and interpretability [17][18][20]. - **Trend 3: Action Tokenization** This trend focuses on converting continuous robot actions into discrete tokens that VLMs can understand, enhancing efficiency and integration of reasoning with actions [21][24]. - **Trend 4: Reinforcement Learning (RL)** RL is reintroduced as a fine-tuning tool for VLA strategies, addressing limitations of imitation learning in extreme scenarios [25][26]. - **Trend 5: Efficiency Optimization** Efforts to optimize VLA models aim to reduce costs and hardware requirements, making the field more accessible to smaller research labs [27][28]. - **Trend 6: Video Prediction for Physical Intuition** Video generation models provide inherent understanding of temporal dynamics and physical laws, enhancing robot control capabilities [29][35]. - **Trend 7: Realistic Evaluation Benchmarks** New evaluation methods are being developed to overcome saturation in existing benchmarks, focusing on future frame prediction and action generation capabilities [36][39]. - **Trend 8: Cross-Modal Learning** Innovations in architecture are essential for developing universal robot strategies that can operate across different action spaces [40][42]. Challenges and Future Directions - The article highlights the "performance ceiling" issue in mainstream simulation evaluations, where high scores do not necessarily translate to real-world capabilities [43][44]. - Two critical areas needing more attention are data quality and in-context learning, which could be pivotal for breakthroughs in VLA research [48][49].