HALO: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21157v2
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:18:30 GMT
• Title: HALO: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Abstract summary: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but often struggle in long-horizon or out-of-distribution scenarios.<n>We propose HALO, a unified VLA model that enables embodied multimodal chain-of-thought (EM-CoT) reasoning.<n>We instantiate HALO with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that decouples semantic reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction into specialized experts.
• Score: 23.266655371621965
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but often struggle in long-horizon or out-of-distribution scenarios due to the lack of explicit mechanisms for multimodal reasoning and anticipating how the world will evolve under action. Recent works introduce textual chain-of-thought or visual subgoal prediction within VLA models to reason, but still fail to offer a unified human-like reasoning framework for joint textual reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction. To this end, we propose HALO, a unified VLA model that enables embodied multimodal chain-of-thought (EM-CoT) reasoning through a sequential process of textual task reasoning, visual subgoal prediction for fine-grained guidance, and EM-CoT-augmented action prediction. We instantiate HALO with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that decouples semantic reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction into specialized experts while allowing seamless cross-expert collaboration. To enable HALO learning at scale, we introduce an automated pipeline to synthesize EM-CoT training data along with a carefully crafted training recipe. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) HALO achieves superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments, surpassing baseline policy pi_0 by 34.1% on RoboTwin benchmark; (2) all proposed components of the training recipe and EM-CoT design help improve task success rate; and (3) HALO exhibits strong generalization capabilities under aggressive unseen environmental randomization with our proposed EM-CoT reasoning.

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