Runzhong Huang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space

What visual representation should a navigation policy act on? Navigation policies built on vision foundation models largely leave representation design to the encoders' pretraining objectives. We present RepresentNav, a navigation foundation model built on a self-constructed representation space: a visual representation constructed by the policy's own objectives from vision foundation models. RepresentNav builds this space with Representation Residuals, a compact three-layer transformer that attends over features spanning the full depth of multiple complementary vision foundation models, so that the policy learns to see what it needs for navigation. In the same space it dreams what it wants: before every action a latent chain-of-thought predicts the representation of the scene a moment ahead. The dream is trained end-to-end with the policy as a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA), with a next-representation prediction loss and a regularizer on its targets. RepresentNav sets a new state of the art on VLNVerse, VLN-CE R2R, EVT-Bench, and two point-goal benchmarks, and its gains carry over to a physical robot amid clutter and moving people. On VLNVerse fine-grained, RepresentNav achieves 83.80% success, outperforming the previous state of the art by 20.05 percentage points, and on EVT-Bench distracted tracking it reaches 85.5% with a single camera (+10.1). With the same encoders, the self-constructed space clearly outperforms concatenating their outputs and learns to weight their layers unevenly, and a dream in it cuts collisions by a quarter. A single dreamed latent decodes into the depth, semantics, and 3D occupancy of the scene a moment ahead, more accurately than pretrained encoders applied to the real future frame, although occupancy is never supervised, and the rollout tracks the robot's own motion over the next second: the dream emerges as a compact latent world model.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

ManualVLA: A Unified VLA Model for Chain-of-Thought Manual Generation and Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged, demonstrating strong generalization in robotic scene understanding and manipulation. However, when confronted with long-horizon tasks that require defined goal states, such as LEGO assembly or object rearrangement, existing VLA models still face challenges in coordinating high-level planning with precise manipulation. Therefore, we aim to endow a VLA model with the capability to infer the "how" process from the "what" outcomes, transforming goal states into executable procedures. In this paper, we introduce ManualVLA, a unified VLA framework built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, enabling coherent collaboration between multimodal manual generation and action execution. Unlike prior VLA models that directly map sensory inputs to actions, we first equip ManualVLA with a planning expert that generates intermediate manuals consisting of images, position prompts, and textual instructions. Building upon these multimodal manuals, we design a Manual Chain-of-Thought (ManualCoT) reasoning process that feeds them into the action expert, where each manual step provides explicit control conditions, while its latent representation offers implicit guidance for accurate manipulation. To alleviate the burden of data collection, we develop a high-fidelity digital-twin toolkit based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, which automatically generates manual data for planning expert training. ManualVLA demonstrates strong real-world performance, achieving an average success rate 32% higher than the previous hierarchical SOTA baseline on LEGO assembly and object rearrangement tasks.

cs.RO↗