Laurence Tianruo Yang
Author directory2026
IntentVLA: Short-Horizon Intent Modeling for Aliased Robot Manipulation
Shijie Lian | Bin Yu | Xiaopeng Lin | Zhaolong Shen | Laurence Tianruo Yang | Yurun Jin | Haishan Liu | Changti Wu | Hang Yuan | Cong Huang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shijie Lian | Bin Yu | Xiaopeng Lin | Zhaolong Shen | Laurence Tianruo Yang | Yurun Jin | Haishan Liu | Changti Wu | Hang Yuan | Cong Huang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Robot imitation data are often multimodal: similar visual-language observations may be followed by different action chunks because human demonstrators act with different short-horizon intents, task phases, or recent context. Existing frame-conditioned VLA policies infer each chunk from the current observation and instruction alone, so under partial observability they may resample different intents across adjacent replanning steps, leading to inter-chunk conflict and unstable execution. We introduce IntentVLA, a history-conditioned VLA framework that encodes recent visual observations into a compact short-horizon intent representation and uses it to condition chunk generation. We further introduce AliasBench, a 12-task ambiguity-aware benchmark on RoboTwin2 with matched training data and evaluation environments that isolate short-horizon observation aliasing. Across AliasBench, SimplerEnv, LIBERO, and RoboCasa, IntentVLA improves rollout stability and outperforms strong VLA baselines.