VLA-Thinker: Boosting Vision-Language-Action Models through Thinking-with-Image Reasoning
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising capabilities for embodied intelligence, but most existing approaches rely on text-based chain-of-thought reasoning where visual inputs are treated as static context. This limits the ability of the model to actively revisit the environment and resolve ambiguities during long-horizon tasks. We propose VLA-Thinker, a thinking-with-image reasoning framework that models perception as a dynamically invocable reasoning action. To train such a system, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline consisting of (1) an SFT cold-start phase with curated visual Chain-of-Thought data to activate structured reasoning and tool-use behaviors, and (2) ...
| Authors | Chaoyang Wang, Wenrui Bao, Sicheng Gao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 15 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 March 2026 |
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