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arXiv · 2602.12322

ForeAct: Steering Your VLA with Efficient Visual Foresight Planning

Zhuoyang Zhang·Shang Yang·Qinghao Hu·Luke J. Huang·James Hou·Yufei Sun·Yao Lu·Song Han
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Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models convert high-level language instructions into concrete, executable actions, a task that is especially challenging in open-world environments. We present Visual Foresight Planning (ForeAct), a general and efficient planner that guides a VLA step-by-step using imagined future observations and subtask descriptions. With an imagined future observation, the VLA can focus on visuo-motor inference rather than high-level semantic reasoning, leading to improved accuracy and generalization. Our planner comprises a highly efficient foresight image generation module that predicts a high-quality 640$\times$480 future observation from the current visual input and language instruction within only 0.33s on an H100 GPU, together with a vision-language model that reasons over the task and produces subtask descriptions for both the generator and the VLA. Importantly, state-of-the-art VLAs can integrate our planner seamlessly by simply augmenting their visual inputs, without any architectural modification. The foresight generator is pretrained on over 1 million multi-task, cross-embodiment episodes, enabling it to learn robust embodied dynamics. We evaluate our framework on a benchmark that consists of 11 diverse, multi-step real-world tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 87.4%, demonstrating a +40.9% absolute improvement over the $π_0$ baseline (46.5%) and a +30.3% absolute improvement over $π_0$ augmented with textual subtask guidance (57.1%).

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Zhuoyang Zhang, Shang Yang, Qinghao Hu, Luke J. Huang, James Hou, Yufei Sun, Yao Lu, Song Han. 2026-02-12. ForeAct: Steering Your VLA with Efficient Visual Foresight Planning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12322

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