VistaVLA: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware 3D Gaussian-Grounded VLA for Robotic Manipulation

Jul 15, 2026

VistaVLA is a two-stage framework that builds a geometry- and semantics-aware 3D cognitive representation from 3D Gaussian primitives for robotic manipulation. Using a Merge-then-Query mechanism, it compresses dense Gaussian primitives into compact tokens, achieving a 99% reduction in token count while preserving action-relevant 3D layouts and semantic context. In real-world tests, VistaVLA improved success rates by 22.8% across seven tasks and by 30.0% on out-of-distribution tasks compared to the VLA-Adapter baseline.

Why it matters: VistaVLA advances robotic manipulation by enabling explicit 3D semantic reasoning, leading to significantly improved performance in both standard and out-of-distribution real-world scenarios.

Full story at: arXiv Robotics ↗