DyPES-VLA: Learning Shared Dynamics Priors and Embodiment-Specific Control for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

DyPES-VLA: Learning Shared Dynamics Priors and Embodiment-Specific Control for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

Junfeng Li, Junjie He, Zhide Zhong, Yangyang Zheng, Pingyue Sheng, Jiayu Dong, Ruixin Li, Haodong Yan, Jiaguan Zhu, Tianran Zhang, Runze Yu, Wen Chen, Liuqing Yang, Yuxiang Gao, Haoang Li · N/A · 2026

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Summary

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a powerful paradigm for robot manipulation, but training a single generalist policy for heterogeneous robot embodiments remains an open problem. Existing methods have two main limitations.

Abstract Summary

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a powerful paradigm for robot manipulation, but training a single generalist policy for heterogeneous robot embodiments remains an open problem. Existing methods have two main limitations. First, they underuse dynamics priors shared across diverse visual and interaction data, limiting cross-embodiment transfer. Second, they require extensive manual preprocessing to convert embodiment-specific actions into a common format. To overcome these limitations, we propose DyPES-VLA, a cross-embodiment VLA that learns shared Dynamics Priors and Embodiment-Specific control. First, we learn shared dynamics priors by training the vision-language model (VLM) with a future-prediction objective on cross-embodiment data, driving the shared query representation to capture object motion, contact, and interaction-induced scene changes. Second, an embodiment-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) action head translates these shared dynamics priors into executable controls directly in each embodiment's native action space, without manually pre-aligning heterogeneous actions into a common format. This head shares attention layers to capture common temporal action structures, while its embodiment-specific feed-forward experts resolve the unique kinematic constraints and control semantics of distinct embodiments. As a generalist policy, our \ourmethod achieves state-of-the-art performance across simulation and real-world evaluations, reaching 98.0% success on LIBERO, 59.25% on RoboCasa-GR1, and 89.02% on RoboTwin~2.0.

Key Points

  • Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a powerful paradigm for robot manipulation, but training a single generalist policy for heterogeneous robot embodiments remains an open problem.
  • Existing methods have two main limitations
  • First, they underuse dynamics priors shared across diverse visual and interaction data, limiting cross-embodiment transfer.
  • Second, they require extensive manual preprocessing to convert embodiment-specific actions into a common format.
  • To overcome these limitations, we propose DyPES-VLA, a cross-embodiment VLA that learns shared Dynamics Priors and Embodiment-Specific control.

Methodology

As shown in Fig. 2 , our DyPES-VLA comprises three components that jointly learn shared dynamics priors and embodiment-specific control. 1) A pretrained VLM Bai et al. (2025) encodes the visual observations, the instruction, and the embodiment metadata, together with a set of learnable query tokens appended to the multimodal sequence; the output query states form the shared interface between the two heads.

2) A future generation head, instantiated as a SANA image generator Xie et al.

Methodology — DyPES-VLA: Learning Shared Dynamics Priors and Embodiment-Specific Control for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation
Figure 3 : Real-world rollouts of our DyPES-VLA using a single checkpoint jointly finetuned on demonstrations from three physical embodiments with distinct morphologies. Each row shows the hardware setup followed by six keyframes (left to right) of one representative task per platform: an FR3 single-arm robot (top), a COBOT Magic dual-arm robot (middle), and a G1 humanoid (bottom).

Experiments

In this section, we evaluate whether future-supervised dynamics priors and the embodiment-specific MoE action head provide an effective paradigm for cross-embodiment manipulation learning. We organize the experiments around the following questions: Q1: Can our DyPES-VLA use a single checkpoint to perform across simulation benchmarks with distinct embodiments and native action spaces?

Q2: Does future supervision enrich the shared representation with dynamics priors and improve cross-embodiment policy learning? Q3: Does embodiment-specific action...

Sources and Demonstrations

Figures are reproduced from Li et al. See the full paper for experimental details and the project page, when the paper links one, for demonstrations and videos.

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