{"ID":2828180,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15692","arxiv_id":"2512.15692","title":"mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAs","abstract":"Prevailing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) for robotic manipulation are built upon vision-language backbones pretrained on large-scale, but disconnected static web data. As a result, despite improved semantic generalization, the policy must implicitly infer complex physical dynamics and temporal dependencies solely from robot trajectories. This reliance creates an unsustainable data burden, necessitating continuous, large-scale expert data collection to compensate for the lack of innate physical understanding. We contend that while vision-language pretraining effectively captures semantic priors, it remains blind to physical causality. A more effective paradigm leverages video to jointly capture semantics and visual dynamics during pretraining, thereby isolating the remaining task of low-level control. To this end, we introduce mimic-video, a novel Video-Action Model (VAM) that pairs a pretrained Internet-scale video model with a flow matching-based action decoder conditioned on its latent representations. The decoder serves as an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM), generating low-level robot actions from the latent representation of video-space action plans. Our extensive evaluation shows that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, improving sample efficiency by 10x and convergence speed by 2x compared to traditional VLA architectures.","short_abstract":"Prevailing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) for robotic manipulation are built upon vision-language backbones pretrained on large-scale, but disconnected static web data. As a result, despite improved semantic generalization, the policy must implicitly infer complex physical dynamics and temporal dependencies solel...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15692","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15692v2","authors":"[\"Jonas Pai\",\"Liam Achenbach\",\"Victoriano Montesinos\",\"Benedek Forrai\",\"Oier Mees\",\"Elvis Nava\"]","published":"2025-12-17T18:47:31Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CV\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}