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arXiv · 2606.08288

MotionVLA: Injecting Geometric Motion into Vision-Language-Action Model

Shanglin Yuan·Weiheng Zhao·Xianda Guo·Wei Sui·Li Yu·Wenyu Liu·Xinggang Wang
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Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly condition robot policies on history, depth, or 4D features to resolve ambiguity in long-horizon manipulation. However, more spatiotemporal evidence is not necessarily better: when the injected evidence is not motion-consistent, it can introduce geometric drift, fragmented temporal cues, and unstable action generation. This raises a simple question: should a VLA remember past frames, or remember the motion that connects them? We introduce MotionVLA, a motion-history interface that converts a short past-only video window into compact, time-continuous trajectory-field tokens. Instead of treating history as a sparse set of ndependently lifted frames, MotionVLA represents recent observations as physically coherent motion evidence. Current visual tokens query this history to retrieve task-relevant motion information, which is then recoupled into the VLA stream under trajectory-grounded supervision. Experiments across simulation benchmarks and preliminary real-robot rollouts show that MotionVLA improves long-horizon manipulation while producing smoother and more direct executions. These results suggest that effective VLA memory is not just about providing more 4D context, but about exposing motion-consistent evidence that is usable for control.

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Shanglin Yuan, Weiheng Zhao, Xianda Guo, Wei Sui, Li Yu, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang. 2026-06-06. MotionVLA: Injecting Geometric Motion into Vision-Language-Action Model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08288

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