GaussVLA: Geometry-Aware Spatial Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models encode visual observations as flat 2D patch tokens that carry no intrinsic geometric structure, and augmenting them with dense monocular depth injects per-pixel scalar values that encode neither surface orientation nor geometric confidence. This leaves the policy with limited structured spatial reasoning for action prediction. We propose GaussVLA, a Mamba-based VLA that incorporates two custom modules: Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer (GST) to lift frozen semantic and depth features into compact 3D Gaussian tokens, pools geometrically salient regions with learned queries, and \emph{Depth-Aware Chain-of-Thought (DA-CoT)} that performs structured, non-autoregressive geometric reasoning under language and flow-time conditioning. Across both simulation and real-world evaluations, GaussVLA demonstrates strong spatial-manipulation performance while remaining parameter-efficient. On LIBERO, it achieves 93.5% average success and 100.0% success on the Spatial suite with only 200M parameters, improving over SpatialVLA by 19.7% relative average success while remaining significantly more parameter-efficient.

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2608.24959 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.24959v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24959 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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