In this report, we present Pelican-VLA 0.5, a unified VLA model that integrates vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction within a single architecture. Pelican-VLA 0.5 achieves attention-level generalization: without object annotations, segmentation masks, attention supervision, or task-specific fine-tuning, its action pathway already focuses on the manipulation-relevant object and contact region. This behavior persists across unseen scenes and unseen robot embodiments, and is substantially stronger than in other open-source VLA baselines. We verify that this ability originates from the learnable Bottleneck Token inserted between perception and action: by routing task-relevant visual information through a compact bottleneck, the tokens interface induces manipulation-centric attention during pre-training and remains effective across different policy structures, including a MoT-style architecture.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for generalizable robotic manipulations. In particular, flow matching-based VLA models have shown remarkable success due to their capability to generate precise and smooth action sequences and capture multim…
Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong language-conditioned manipulation knowledge, but they remain largely vision-driven and can struggle once manipulation enters contact states where the scene is occluded, depth is ambiguous, or small force errors push…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be britt…
Does adding a reasoning step make a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model more robust to perturbation? Intuitively, a policy that reasons before acting should absorb a perturbed input better than one that maps observations directly to actions. We test this premise head-on across thr…
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong multimodal understanding and spatial grounding, but their computational cost limits real-time robotic control. In contrast, lightweight models are suitable for edge deployment but often suffer from "spatial blindness", namely…
Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-…