Seeing Space and Motion: Enhancing Latent Actions with Geometric and Dynamic Awareness for Vision-Language-Action Models
About
Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable Vision- Language-Action (VLA) systems to learn semantic action representations from large-scale unannotated data. Yet, we identify two bottlenecks of LAMs: 1) the commonly adopted end-to-end trained image encoder suffers from poor spatial understanding; 2) LAMs can be fragile when input frames are temporally distant, leading to limited temporal percep- tion. Such factors inevitably hinder stable and clear action modeling. To this end, we propose Farsighted-LAM, a latent action framework with geometry-aware spatial encoding and multi-scale temporal modeling, capturing structural priors and dynamic motion patterns from consecutive frames. We further propose SSM-VLA, an end-to-end VLA framework built upon Farsighted-LAM, which integrates structured perception with a visual Chain-of-Thought module to explicitly reason about environmental dynamics, enhancing decision consistency and interpretability. We validate SSM-VLA on multiple VLA tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, and achieve state-of- the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our strategy of combining geometry-aware modeling, temporal coherence, and explicit reasoning is effective in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied intelligence.