Evo-0: Vision-Language-Action Model with Implicit Spatial Understanding (2507.00416v1)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising framework for enabling generalist robots capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting in the real world. These models usually build upon pretrained Vision-LLMs (VLMs), which excel at semantic understanding due to large-scale text pretraining. However, VLMs typically lack precise spatial understanding capabilities, as they are primarily tuned on 2D image-text pairs without 3D supervision. To address this limitation, recent approaches have incorporated explicit 3D inputs such as point clouds or depth maps, but this necessitates additional depth sensors or defective estimation. In contrast, our work introduces a plug-and-play module that implicitly injects 3D geometry features into VLA models by leveraging an off-the-shelf visual geometry foundation models. We design five spatially challenging tasks that require precise spatial understanding ability to validate effectiveness of our method. Extensive evaluations show that our method significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art VLA models across diverse scenarios.