# DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24159 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24159/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (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)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07864/) (2024)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15830/) (2025)
- [CogACT: A Foundational Vision-Language-Action Model for Synergizing Cognition and Action in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19650/) (2024)
- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02523/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [3D-VLA: A 3D Vision-Language-Action Generative World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09631/) (2024)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [TraceVLA: Visual Trace Prompting Enhances Spatial-Temporal Awareness for Generalist Robotic Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10345/) (2024)
- [LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13626/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26103/) (2026)
- [GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23927/) (2026)
- [Wiring Matters: Injection Topology and Initialization of Affordance Heads in Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06318/) (2026)
- [OpenWAM: An Open Framework for Composable World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07922/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations. Video generative models offer a promising foundation by encoding rich spatiotemporal priors through future predictions. However, existing Video-Action Models either couple video and action prediction in a shared backbone, making policy adaptation harder to optimize, or under-utilize video information when guiding the action branch. In this work, we introduce DeVA, a Decoupled Video-Action model with specialized video and action experts, multi-level feature transfer, and physically salient guidance. DeVA transfers representations from multiple video layers to the action expert, enabling rich information exchange while making policy learning more tractable. It further supervises intermediate video features and the action stream with physically salient guidance (affordance/depth). Experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world deployment demonstrate strong performance with limited data, faster convergence than a unified architecture, and clear performance gains from physical guidance.