GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation

Abstract:Embodied foundation models have significantly propelled the advancement of artificial general intelligence, yet they rely heavily on large-scale data. Recent studies identify human behavior as one of the most scalable sources for fostering robotic physical intelligence. However, the inherent embodiment gap remains a fundamental challenge for effective human-to-robot learning. In this work, we model human intention to enable efficient learning from human demonstrations. Among human behavioral cues, gaze simultaneously encodes high-level task semantics and exhibits a synergistic coupling with low-level action. By modeling intention through gaze, we derive a mid-level representation that facilitates cross-embodiment knowledge transfer. We demonstrate that robots can internalize human intentions to enhance manipulation, even without robotic intention annotations. To capture the synergy between intention and action, we adopt a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm during inference. Our approach enables the execution of long-horizon and fine-grained tasks across diverse embodiments. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baseline approaches and generalizes to unseen settings. Project page: this https URL .

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2604.22615 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2604.22615v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.22615 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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