mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MedVLA: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Framework for Closed-Loop Precision Medical Robot Manipulation

arXiv 2609.25756 ↗First posted 22 Sep 2026cs.ROcited by 0

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

  1. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control31 Oct
  2. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model13 Jun

Other references · 6

  1. 2017Surgical Data Science: Enabling Next-Generation Surgerycited by 126
  2. 2020Surgical Data Science -- from Concepts toward Clinical Translationcited by 105
  3. 2021Comparative Validation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Surgical Workflow and Skill Analysis with the HeiChole Benchmarkcited by 58
  4. 2024General-purpose foundation models for increased autonomy in robot-assisted surgerycited by 15
  5. 2024From Decision to Action in Surgical Autonomy: Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Robot-Assisted Blood Suctioncited by 6
  6. 2025TEMSET-24K: Densely Annotated Dataset for Indexing Multipart Endoscopic Videos using Surgical Timeline Segmentationcited by 2

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  1. 2026SimVLA: A Simple VLA Baseline for Robotic Manipulation
  2. 2026ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning
  3. 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
  4. 2025InstructVLA: Vision-Language-Action Instruction Tuning from Understanding to Manipulation
  5. 2025Vision Language Action Models in Robotic Manipulation: A Systematic Review
  6. 2024TinyVLA: Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
  7. 2025Lightweight Structured Multimodal Reasoning for Clinical Scene Understanding in Robotics
  8. 2026DAM-VLA: A Dynamic Action Model-Based Vision-Language-Action Framework for Robot Manipulation