mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MobileVLA-R1 2.0: RL-Enhanced Reasoning for Mobile Robot Control

arXiv 2609.06251 ↗First posted 5 Sep 2026cs.CV cs.ROcited by 1

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reasoning and chain-of-thought in VLA

Abstract (arXiv)

Grounding natural-language instructions into reliable and executable actions remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language-action (VLA) systems on mobile robots, due to the persistent gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level locomotion and manipulation control. Existing approaches often rely on implicit reasoning or monolithic action prediction, making it difficult to maintain coherent long-horizon decision making while producing precise and adaptable robot actions. To address this challenge, we propose MobileVLA-R1 2.0, an RL-enhanced VLA framework that explicitly couples structured embodied reasoning with executable mobile robot control. The framework learns multi-granularity reasoning over embodied trajectories through supervised Chain-of-Thought (CoT) alignment and reinforcement learning, improving reasoning-to-action consistency beyond purely behavioral supervision. To support both locomotion and manipulation, we further introduce a reasoning-conditioned action decoder that maps multimodal reasoning representations to task-level action targets, which are subsequently translated into embodiment-specific commands by robot controllers. This design provides a unified perception-reasoning-action interface while decoupling high-level action generation from robot-specific actuation. We conduct extensive evaluations on language-guided navigation, quadruped control, and humanoid mobile manipulation, covering VLN-CE, QUARD, and real-world deployments on Unitree Go2 and G1 robots. MobileVLA-R1 2.0 consistently outperforms strong VLA baselines, achieving an average 1.6 point improvement in SR on VLN-CE and a 10.0 point improvement in full-task success on real-world G1 mobile manipulation tasks over MobileVLA-R1, while demonstrating robust long-horizon instruction following and closed-loop execution across different robotic platforms.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning and chain-of-thought in VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 69 of its 70 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2026.

Builds on

69 of 70 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ACoT-VLA: Action Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action Models16 Jan
  2. 2025MobileVLA-R1: Reinforcing Vision-Language-Action for Mobile Robots22 Nov
  3. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models27 Mar
  4. 2024Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning11 Jul

Other references · 65

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  4. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  5. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  6. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  7. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  8. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  9. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,348
  10. 2023PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Modelcited by 2,071
  11. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  12. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,484
38 more
  1. 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,422
  2. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,376
  3. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
  4. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,035
  5. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,027
  6. 2023Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Strongercited by 589
  7. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 441
  8. 2020Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Explorationcited by 429
  9. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 414
  10. 2018Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 340
  11. 2018Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 305
  12. 2020A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigationcited by 302
  13. 2021History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 271
  14. 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 233
  15. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 231
  16. 2023Where are we in the search for an Artificial Visual Cortex for Embodied Intelligence?cited by 218
  17. 2024NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigationcited by 211
  18. 2019Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Taskscited by 179
  19. 2019Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimationcited by 176
  20. 2023ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 169
  21. 2024InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environmentcited by 157
  22. 2024Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Taskscited by 156
  23. 2022Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 132
  24. 2023GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 124
  25. 2023L3MVN: Leveraging Large Language Models for Visual Target Navigationcited by 120
  26. 2025StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modelingcited by 118
  27. 2020Topological Planning with Transformers for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 116
  28. 2020Language and Visual Entity Relationship Graph for Agent Navigationcited by 100
  29. 2021Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 94
  30. 2022Cross-modal Map Learning for Vision and Language Navigationcited by 91
  31. 2022Sim-2-Sim Transfer for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 86
  32. 2022Weakly-Supervised Multi-Granularity Map Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 86
  33. 2023DREAMWALKER: Mental Planning for Continuous Vision-Language Navigationcited by 85
  34. 2024Affordances-Oriented Planning using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigationcited by 65
  35. 2025VLN-R1: Vision-Language Navigation via Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 63
  36. 2021The Road to Know-Where: An Object-and-Room Informed Sequential BERT for Indoor Vision-Language Navigationcited by 61
  37. 2023QUAR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Quadruped Robotscited by 56
  38. 2023SayNav: Grounding Large Language Models for Dynamic Planning to Navigation in New Environmentscited by 53

50 most cited of 65 All 65 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Unified Embodied VLM Reasoning with Robotic Action via Autoregressive Discretized Pre-training
  2. 2026Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies for Embodied Reasoning and Hierarchical Control
  3. 2026G0.5: One Autoregressive Stream for Robot Reasoning and Action
  4. 2026Latent Reasoning VLA: Latent Thinking and Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Models
  5. 2026Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodiments
  6. 2026ElegantVLA: Learning When to Think for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models
  7. 2026Revisiting Embodied Chain-of-Thought for Generalizable Robot Manipulation
  8. 2025DualVLA: Building a Generalizable Embodied Agent via Partial Decoupling of Reasoning and Action