Bridge Thinking and Acting: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03896v1
• Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2025 18:33:27 GMT
• Title: Bridge Thinking and Acting: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert
• Authors: Mingyu Liu, Zheng Huang, Xiaoyi Lin, Muzhi Zhu, Canyu Zhao, Zongze Du, Yating Wang, Haoyi Zhu, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen,
• Abstract summary: Vision-Language Models (VLM) have demonstrated impressive planning and reasoning capabilities.<n>Recent dual-system approaches attempt to decouple "thinking" from "acting"<n>We introduce a framework centered around a generalizable action expert.
• Score: 60.88976842557026
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Although Vision-Language Models (VLM) have demonstrated impressive planning and reasoning capabilities, translating these abilities into the physical world introduces significant challenges. Conventional Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate reasoning and action into a monolithic architecture, generalize poorly because they are constrained by scarce, narrow-domain data. While recent dual-system approaches attempt to decouple "thinking" from "acting", they are often constrained by semantic ambiguities within the action module. This ambiguity makes large-scale, cross-task training infeasible. Consequently, these systems typically necessitate fine-tuning on newly collected data when deployed to novel environments, and the cooperation mechanism between the two systems remains ill-defined. To address these limitations, we introduce, for the first time, a framework centered around a generalizable action expert. Our approach utilizes sparse 3D trajectories as an intermediate representation, effectively bridging the high-level planning capabilities of the VLM with the low-level physical action module. During the planning phase, the VLM is only required to generate coarse 3D waypoints. These waypoints are then processed by our generalizable action expert, which refines them into dense, executable action sequences by sampling real-time point cloud observations of the environment. To promote training efficiency and robust generalization, we introduce a novel "Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning" paradigm. Our method combines the broad generalization capabilities of VLMs in visual understanding and planning with the fine-grained, action-level generalization of action expert.

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