# ObjDream: Guiding Vision-Language-Action Models with Object-Level Understanding and Future State Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20223/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D and spatial-aware VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [3D and spatial-aware VLA](https://mlsanity.com/vla/3d-and-spatial-aware-vla/)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation, enabling robots to generate actions from visual observations and language instructions. However, most existing VLA models still operate on image-level visual representations inherited from pretrained vision-language backbones, while lacking fine-grained object understanding for manipulation. As a result, their robustness can degrade under out-of-distribution object layouts, clutter, and background variations. To address these limitations, we introduce ObjDream, an object-centric VLA framework centered on object-level understanding and future object state prediction. ObjDream uses a spatio-temporal object encoder to organize visual observations into temporal object slots, where persistent object identity and dynamic object state are represented through separate channels. These structured object representations are inserted into the token sequence of the vision-language model (VLM), where identity-guided routing modulates VLM attention to the corresponding object tokens. In addition, an action-conditioned object dynamics module predicts compact future object states relevant to manipulation during training, explicitly supervising object state evolution under robot actions without requiring future prediction at inference. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0 show that ObjDream improves generalization under diverse distribution shifts and scene perturbations. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate that ObjDream transfers to physical manipulation settings with novel object arrangements and background changes.