# RynnVLA-001: Using Human Demonstrations to Improve Robot Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15212 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15212/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Human-video and latent-action pretraining, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 71 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Human-video and latent-action pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/vla/human-video-and-latent-action-pretraining/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17502/) (2025)
- [World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00080/) (2026)
- [A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24795/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Video Generation Model for the Embodied World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15282/) (2026)
- [HiF-VLA: Hindsight, Insight and Foresight through Motion Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09928/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04161/) (2026)
- [Seeing to Act, Prompting to Specify: A Bayesian Factorization of Vision Language Action Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11218/) (2025)
- [Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16175/) (2025)
- [EMMA: Generalizing Real-World Robot Manipulation via Generative Visual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22407/) (2025)
- [PhysBrain: Human Egocentric Data as a Bridge from Vision Language Models to Physical Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16793/) (2025)
- [LIBERO-Safety: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Physical and Semantic Safety in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23686/) (2026)
- [One Token Per Frame: Reconsidering Visual Bandwidth in World Models for VLA Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07931/) (2026)
- [GEM: Generative Supervision Helps Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28548/) (2026)
- [Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24744/) (2026)
- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12366/) (2026)
- [An Anatomy of Vision-Language-Action Models: From Modules to Milestones and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11362/) (2025)
- [Controllable Egocentric Video Generation via Occlusion-Aware Sparse 3D Hand Joints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11755/) (2026)
- [SeerGuard: A Safety Framework for Mobile GUI Agents via World Model Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15550/) (2026)
- [SG-WAM: Text-Grounded and Spatial-aware Semantic Guidance for World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08839/) (2026)
- [From Inference Efficiency to Embodied Efficiency: Revisiting Efficiency Metrics for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19131/) (2026)
- [From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12167/) (2026)
- [ELAN4D: Embodiment-Centric 4D Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models via Plug-and-Play Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30484/) (2026)
- [PhyAI: Real-Time Physical AI at the Edge, Scalable Rollouts in the Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03682/) (2026)
- [UniWAM: Unified World-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02054/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents RynnVLA-001, a vision-language-action(VLA) model built upon large-scale video generative pretraining from human demonstrations. We propose a novel two-stage pretraining methodology. The first stage, Ego-Centric Video Generative Pretraining, trains an Image-to-Video model on 12M ego-centric manipulation videos to predict future frames conditioned on an initial frame and a language instruction. The second stage, Human-Centric Trajectory-Aware Modeling, extends this by jointly predicting future keypoint trajectories, thereby effectively bridging visual frame prediction with action prediction. Furthermore, to enhance action representation, we propose ActionVAE, a variational autoencoder that compresses sequences of actions into compact latent embeddings, reducing the complexity of the VLA output space. When finetuned on the same downstream robotics datasets, RynnVLA-001 achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating that the proposed pretraining strategy provides a more effective initialization for VLA models.