From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulation
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.
Key facts. Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 73 of its 80 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 May 2025.
Builds on
73 of 80 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
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- 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models3 Jun
- 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities22 Jan
- 2022Visual Spatial Reasoning30 Apr
Other references · 65
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50 most cited of 65 All 65 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 12; 2026: 22.
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12 most cited of 13 All 13 (JSON)
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- 2026RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought14 Jun 2026
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- 2026SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning30 Mar 2026
- 2026RoboAlign: Learning Test-Time Reasoning for Language-Action Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models22 Mar 2026
- 2026Spatially Grounded Long-Horizon Task Planning in the Wild13 Mar 2026
- 2026AnchorVLA4D: an Anchor-Based Spatial-Temporal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation13 Mar 2026
- 2026Do MLLMs Really Understand Space? A Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation12 Feb 2026
- 2025Towards Spatial Trace with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics15 Dec 2025
- 2025Obstruction reasoning for robotic grasping28 Nov 2025
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12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2025Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videoscited by 94
- 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 66
- 2026Long-Horizon Manipulation via Trace-Conditioned VLA Planningcited by 9
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- 2026AnySlot: Goal-Conditioned Vision-Language-Action Policies for Zero-Shot Slot-Level Placement12 Apr 2026
- 2026RoboHarness: A Memory-Augmented Policy Harness for Vision-Language-Action Model Robustness via In-Context Adaptation25 Mar 2026
- 2026ST-VLA: Enabling 4D-Aware Spatiotemporal Understanding for General Robot Manipulation14 Mar 2026
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- 2025Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos21 Jul 2025
- 2025XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representationscited by 15
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- 2026PhysBrain 1.5: From Vision-Language Models to Physical Foundation Modelscited by 0
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- 20263DWay: Generalizing Robot Manipulation via 3D Consistent Waypoints8 Sep 2026
- 2026Capek 0.5: An Execution-Centric Vision-Language Model for Embodied Intelligence7 Aug 2026
- 2026RoboStressBench: Benchmarking VLM Robustness to Physical Visual Stress in Embodied Scenes30 May 2026
- 2025XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representations4 Nov 2025
- 2025Where, What, Why: Towards Explainable Driver Attention Predictioncited by 10
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- 2025Where, What, Why: Towards Explainable Driver Attention Prediction29 Jun 2025
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