VFlash: Fast, Accurate Visual Planning via Flash Primitive Decoding
Yu-Cheng Chou, Shihao Wang, Jin Huang, Chi-Pin Huang, Chiao-An Yang, Xianzhe Fan, Jing Wang, Zhiqi Li, Yuanguo Kuang, Ruijie Zheng, Johan Bjorck, Sifei Liu, Hang Su, Abhishek Badki, Lei Zhang, Alan Yuille, Linxi "Jim'' Fan, Jan Kautz, Zhiding Yu
2026-11-06
Summary
Models for physical AI tasks, such as robotics and autonomous driving, need not reason solely in language. They can use visual plans--points, bounding boxes, and trajectories--to represent spatial goals and anticipate motion.
What's the problem?
The paper tackles this problem: Models for physical AI tasks, such as robotics and autonomous driving, need not reason solely in language. They can use visual plans--points, bounding boxes, and trajectories--to represent spatial goals and anticipate motion.
What's the solution?
The authors propose this solution: We introduce VFlash, a method for fast, accurate visual planning through Flash Primitive Decoding. VFlash exploits the known structure of visual primitives to predict their coordinates jointly, using a lightweight drafter that generates an entire primitive in one forward pass.
Why it matters?
Why it matters: A world action model conditioned on VFlash plans achieves 70.2% average success across four MolmoSpaces task suites, compared with 62.6% for the baseline.
Abstract
Models for physical AI tasks, such as robotics and autonomous driving, need not reason solely in language. They can use visual plans--points, bounding boxes, and trajectories--to represent spatial goals and anticipate motion. However, autoregressive vision-language models generate these plans one coordinate token at a time, making richer predictions increasingly costly. We introduce VFlash, a method for fast, accurate visual planning through Flash Primitive Decoding. VFlash exploits the known structure of visual primitives to predict their coordinates jointly, using a lightweight drafter that generates an entire primitive in one forward pass. The layout adapts to the primitive's type, dimensionality, and length, supporting compact boxes and long, variable-length trajectories. Crucially, spatial accuracy need not require reproducing an autoregressive model's exact token sequence. VFlash therefore trains on annotated primitives and directly accepts structurally valid predictions without target-token agreement. Across the evaluated 2D and 3D robot trajectory tasks, VFlash consistently reduces prediction errors relative to autoregressive decoding. Preliminary single-rollout measurements indicate approximately 25x faster generation for 3D point motion forecasting. A world action model conditioned on VFlash plans achieves 70.2% average success across four MolmoSpaces task suites, compared with 62.6% for the baseline.