Guava distills frontier VLMs into a 4B robot agent; authors decry CoRL reviewers' VLA bias
furongh · x · 2026-11-16
Co-author Furong Huang shares the Guava team's rejection story at CoRL 2026 (1 weak accept, 1 strong reject, 1 weak reject), blaming reviewers' fixation on VLA: "the way is simple — data + infrastructure." The paper itself (arXiv:2606.18363) presents a harness for embodied tool use with three key ingredients — iterative perception-reasoning-action loops, semantic action abstractions, and multimodal observations — and distills frontier VLMs into a 4B open-source model using under 2K simulation trajectories, matching frontier proprietary models in sim and real-world tests.
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