Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
Original source2 min read

Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization

Summary

Pelican-VLA 0.5 is a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that integrates vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction within a single architecture. It achieves attention-level generalization through learnable Reasoning Slots inserted between perception and action, enabling the action pathway to focus on instruction-relevant objects and contact regions without explicit supervision. This behavior persists across unseen scenes and robot embodiments, outperforming other open-source VLA baselines.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Zeyuan Ding, Wenhai Liu, Yang Xu, Jiayu Hu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Jian Tang, Xiaozhu Ju
Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions
Read article

[Submitted on 7 Jul 2026]

Title:Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization

View a PDF of the paper titled Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization, by Zeyuan Ding and 8 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract: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 instruction-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 Reasoning Slots inserted between perception and action: by routing task-relevant visual information through a compact bottleneck, the slot interface induces manipulation-centric attention during pre-training and remains effective across different policy structures, including a MoT-style architecture.

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.06655 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.06655v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.06655

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Zeyuan Ding [view email] [v1] Tue, 7 Jul 2026 17:50:22 UTC (9,198 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization, by Zeyuan Ding and 8 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.RO

new | recent | 2026-07

Change to browse by:

cs cs.LG

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersAdvanced

Key points

  • Pelican-VLA 0.5 unifies vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction in a single architecture.
  • Learnable Reasoning Slots enable attention-level generalization without object annotations or task-specific fine-tuning.
  • The model generalizes to unseen scenes and robot embodiments, outperforming existing open-source VLA baselines.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.