Beyond Actions: Learning Future Operation Targets for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Actions specify what a robot should execute, but do not describe what those commands will achieve. Vision-language-action (VLA) policies nevertheless learn primarily by predicting action chunks from images, language, and state. We introduce Action--Future Coupled Effect Learning (AFCE), which makes a future-grounded physical Effect the policy's primary prediction target. An offline tokenizer constructs temporally ordered Effect tokens from demonstrated actions, realized robot responses, and sparse visual transitions. Reconstruction objectives encourage the representation to retain executable detail and observed physical change. A flow-matching VLA predicts Effects from current images, instruction, and robot state, while a state-conditioned decoder converts them into action chunks. Embodiment-specific interfaces allow single- and dual-arm tasks to share the Effect model. On DexJoCo, AFCE achieves $50.97\%$ overall success, improving over $π_{0.5}$ and UVT by 11.82 and 15.21 percentage points, respectively. It leads on all five bimanual tasks, highlighting the value of Effect supervision for coordinated dexterous manipulation. The project page is available at https://afceproject.github.io/AFCE-Web/.