Spatial-Aware VLA Pretraining through Visual-Physical Alignment from Human Videos

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a promising paradigm for robot learning by integrating visual perception with language-guided policy learning. However, most existing approaches rely on 2D visual inputs to perform actions in 3D physical environments, creating a significant gap between perception and action grounding. To bridge this gap, we propose a Spatial-Aware VLA Pretraining paradigm that enables models to acquire 3D spatial understanding before robot policy learning. Starting from pretrained vision-language models, we leverage large-scale human demonstration videos to extract 3D visual and 3D action annotations, forming a new source of supervision that aligns 2D visual observations with 3D spatial reasoning. We instantiate this paradigm with VIPA-VLA, a dual-encoder architecture that incorporates a 3D visual encoder to augment semantic visual representations with 3D-aware features, and aligns the two through visual-physical alignment pretraining. When adapted to downstream robot tasks, VIPA-VLA achieves significantly improved grounding between 2D vision and 3D action, resulting in more robust and generalizable robotic policies.