# ASCII Art Turns LLMs into VLA Controllers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01844/) (2025)
- [CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22020/) (2025)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.3785/) (2014)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07077/) (2025)
- [FLOWER: Democratizing Generalist Robot Policies with Efficient Vision-Language-Action Flow Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04996/) (2025)
- [GRID: Scene-Graph-based Instruction-driven Robotic Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07726/) (2023)
- [NanoVLA: Routing Decoupled Vision-Language Understanding for Nano-sized Generalist Robotic Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25122/) (2025)
- [ASCIIEval: Benchmarking Models' Visual Perception in Text Strings via ASCII Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01733/) (2024)
- [ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04125/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Resolving State-Representation Mismatch: State-Space Visual Reasoning for Open-Loop VLA Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33412/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) controllers are often built by extending vision--language models (VLMs) with action supervision, relying on multimodal backbones with large data and compute requirements. We demonstrate that a text-only large language model (LLM) can be adapted into a VLA-style controller when visual observations are rendered into a text input using an ASCII representation. This ASCII-as-vision interface enables existing training and deployment stacks for LLMs to efficiently condition on visual state, follow natural-language instructions, and produce constrained, executable actions. We fine-tune and compare multiple LLMs and VLMs across model families and scales, using both expert demonstrations from a planning-based teacher, as well as DAgger for iterative improvement. In a 2D manipulation benchmark, in both simulation and on a physical manipulator, the resulting controllers can identify task-relevant entities and plan feasible action sequences. Our results suggest that ASCII rendering can serve as a lightweight, interpretable modality bridge from images to text, complementing conventional VLA pipelines, and opening directions for VLA research with text-only backbones.