DualCoT-VLA: Visual-Linguistic Chain of Thought via Parallel Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Zhide Zhong; Junfeng Li; Junjie He; Haodong Yan; Xin Gong; Guanyi Zhao; Yingjie Cai; Jiantao Gao; Xu Yan; Bingbing Liu; Yingcong Chen; Liuqing Yang; Haoang Li

arXiv · 2603.22280

DualCoT-VLA: Visual-Linguistic Chain of Thought via Parallel Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Zhide Zhong·Junfeng Li·Junjie He·Haodong Yan·Xin Gong·Guanyi Zhao·Yingjie Cai·Jiantao Gao·Xu Yan·Bingbing Liu·Yingcong Chen·Liuqing Yang·Haoang Li

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Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions directly to robotic actions. While effective for simple tasks, standard VLA models often struggle with complex, multi-step tasks requiring logical planning, as well as precise manipulations demanding fine-grained spatial perception. Recent efforts have incorporated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to endow VLA models with a ``thinking before acting'' capability. However, current CoT-based VLA models face two critical limitations: 1) an inability to simultaneously capture low-level visual details and high-level logical planning due to their reliance on isolated, single-modal CoT; 2) high inference latency with compounding errors caused by step-by-step autoregressive decoding. To address these limitations, we propose DualCoT-VLA, a visual-linguistic CoT method for VLA models with a parallel reasoning mechanism. To achieve comprehensive multi-modal reasoning, our method integrates a visual CoT for low-level spatial understanding and a linguistic CoT for high-level task planning. Furthermore, to overcome the latency bottleneck, we introduce a parallel CoT mechanism that incorporates two sets of learnable query tokens, shifting autoregressive reasoning to single-step forward reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DualCoT-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LIBERO and RoboCasa GR1 benchmarks, as well as in real-world platforms.

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Zhide Zhong, Junfeng Li, Junjie He, Haodong Yan, Xin Gong, Guanyi Zhao, Yingjie Cai, Jiantao Gao, Xu Yan, Bingbing Liu, Yingcong Chen, Liuqing Yang, Haoang Li. 2026-03-23. DualCoT-VLA: Visual-Linguistic Chain of Thought via Parallel Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22280

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