MedVLA: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Framework for Closed-Loop Precision Medical Robot Manipulation
On the map: Vision-language-action models → Generalist VLA models and benchmarks also fits: Reasoning and chain-of-thought in VLA
Abstract (arXiv)
Precision medical robotics demands adaptive decision-making under strict safety, interpretability, and execution constraints. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong multimodal reasoning ability, their continuous action generation paradigm is not well suited for precision medical tasks, where reliable closed-loop operation may also depend on non-action system function calls. To address this gap, we propose MedVLA, a hierarchical framework that couples high-level multimodal reasoning with low-level function-constrained execution. We further introduce a scalable multi-agent pipeline to generate skill-oriented chain-of-thought(CoT) data for structured training. Built on different multimodal large-model backbones, MedVLA consistently improves performance after fine-tuning, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework across model variants. Under identical initial conditions, we perform 100 closed-loop flexible electrode implantation trials. The results show that MedVLA achieves a 95.0% task success rate, substantially outperforming representative VLA baselines, including OpenVLA (8%) and π0 (15%), in accuracy, stability, and safety. These results indicate that structured reasoning with constrained function-level execution is a practical route toward deployable precision medical robotics.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Generalist VLA models and benchmarks, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 8 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.
Builds on
8 of 24 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control31 Oct
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model13 Jun
Other references · 6
- 2017Surgical Data Science: Enabling Next-Generation Surgerycited by 126
- 2020Surgical Data Science -- from Concepts toward Clinical Translationcited by 105
- 2021Comparative Validation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Surgical Workflow and Skill Analysis with the HeiChole Benchmarkcited by 58
- 2024General-purpose foundation models for increased autonomy in robot-assisted surgerycited by 15
- 2024From Decision to Action in Surgical Autonomy: Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Robot-Assisted Blood Suctioncited by 6
- 2025TEMSET-24K: Densely Annotated Dataset for Indexing Multipart Endoscopic Videos using Surgical Timeline Segmentationcited by 2
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SimVLA: A Simple VLA Baseline for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning
- 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
- 2025InstructVLA: Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning from Understanding to Manipulation
- 2025Vision Language Action Models in Robotic Manipulation: A Systematic Review
- 2024TinyVLA: Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
- 2025Lightweight Structured Multimodal Reasoning for Clinical Scene Understanding in Robotics
- 2026DAM-VLA: A Dynamic Action Model-Based Vision-Language-Action Framework for Robot Manipulation