2026

1. IROS

   LangGap: Diagnosing and Closing the Language Gap in Vision-Language-Action Models

   Yuchen Hou and Lin Zhao

   In 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

   Abs arXiv HTML

   Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve over 95% success on standard benchmarks. However, through systematic experiments, we find that current state-of-the-art VLA models largely ignore language instructions. Prior work lacks: (1) systematic semantic perturbation diagnostics, (2) a benchmark that forces language understanding by design, and (3) linguistically diverse training data. This paper constructs the LangGap benchmark, based on a four-dimensional semantic perturbation method – varying instruction semantics while keeping the tabletop layout fixed – revealing language understanding deficits in \pi0.5. Existing benchmarks like LIBERO assign only one task per layout, underutilizing available objects and target locations; LangGap fully diversifies pick-and-place tasks under identical layouts, forcing models to truly understand language. Experiments show that targeted data augmentation can partially close the language gap – success rate improves from 0% to 90% with single-task training, and 0% to 28% with multi-task training. However, as semantic diversity of extended tasks increases, model learning capacity proves severely insufficient; even trained tasks perform poorly. This reveals a fundamental challenge for VLA models in understanding diverse language instructions – precisely the long-term value of LangGap.

2. IROS

   AION: Aerial Indoor Object-Goal Navigation Using Dual-Policy Reinforcement Learning

   Zichen Yan, Yuchen Hou, Shenao Wang, and 3 more authors

   In 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

   Abs arXiv HTML

   Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to autonomously explore an unknown environment and navigate toward target objects specified by a semantic label. While prior work has primarily studied zero-shot ObjectNav under 2D locomotion, extending it to aerial platforms with 3D locomotion capability remains underexplored. Aerial robots offer superior maneuverability and search efficiency, but they also introduce new challenges in spatial perception, dynamic control, and safety assurance. In this paper, we propose AION for vision-based aerial ObjectNav without relying on external localization or global maps. AION is an end-to-end dual-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework that decouples exploration and goal-reaching behaviors into two specialized policies. We evaluate AION on the AI2-THOR benchmark and further assess its real-time performance in IsaacSim using high-fidelity drone models. Experimental results show that AION achieves superior performance across comprehensive evaluation metrics in exploration, navigation efficiency, and safety.