HiF-VLA: Hindsight, Insight and Foresight through Motion Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models

TL;DR

HiF-VLA introduces a motion-centric world model for vision-language-action tasks, enabling robots to reason about past and future dynamics for improved long-horizon manipulation.

Contribution

It presents a unified framework leveraging motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning, enhancing long-horizon robotic manipulation performance.

Findings

Surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks.

Achieves real-world improvements in long-horizon manipulation tasks.

Incur negligible additional inference latency.

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. From this perspective, HiF-VLA equips a motion-centric world model for the VLA, enabling agents to reason about temporal dynamics for future evolution during action generation. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a ''think-while-acting'' paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.