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State of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Research at ICLR 2026 – Moritz Reuss

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ICLR’s open submission policy gives a rare, real-time view of what the community is actually building. This post distills the state of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models research slice of ICLR 2026: what ‘counts’ as a VLA (and why that definition matters), what people are working on in the VLA field (discrete diffusion, embodied reasoning, new tokenizers), how to read benchmark results in VLA research, and the not-so-invisible frontier gap that sim leaderboards hide. Each autumn, the ICLR publicly releases all anonymous submissions a few weeks after the deadline, providing a unique real-time snapshot of ongoing research around the world without the typical six-month delay of other top ML conferences. Given my personal research interests, I wanted to analyze Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models research and share insights from this year's submissions. In this blog post, I briefly explain what VLAs are, share my findings about current trends and challenges in VLA research, highlighting

State of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Research at ICLR 2026 – Moritz Reuss State of VLA Research at ICLR 2026 October 2025 • by Moritz Reuss ICLR’s open submission policy gives a rare, real-time view of what the community is actually building. This post distills the state of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models research slice of ICLR 2026: what ‘counts’ as a VLA (and why that definition matters), what people are working on in the VLA field (discrete diffusion, embodied reasoning, new tokenizers), how to read benchmark results in VLA research, and the not-so-invisible frontier gap that sim leade

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