Pointing-VLA: Typed Spatial Grounding Interfaces for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
Vision-language-action (VLA) models often expose spatial grounding through autoregressive text coordinates or opaque action tokens, creating brittle interfaces between multimodal reasoning and robot execution. We present Pointing-VLA, a typed hidden-state spatial readout built on Embodied-R1. Geometry-specific heads predict normalized points, object-functional grounding (OFG) heatmaps, and visual trajectories without serializing geometry as text. For the evaluated Bridge/WidowX and physical pick-place deployments, an explicit execution contract assigns PICK to source-conditioned OFG and PLACE to Pointing, providing direct stage-aligned spatial targets. Pointing-VLA achieves SOTA performan...
| Authors | Xiwen Chen, Zelin Li, Zhiruo Zhou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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