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Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths. This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it. More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation. Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control. Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output.

Researchers use large language models as agents in social simulations, where agents are prompted with observations and background information intended to shape their actions. Yet LLM agents have been shown to substantially change their behavior under meaning-preserving prompt variations, creating a validation problem for social simulation. One plausible hypothesis is that this brittleness reflects a lack of grounding and can be reduced by enriching the context provided to the agents. Whether richer context improves robustness remains unclear, in part because context richness and robustness are rarely defined in ways that support controlled comparisons. We address the first need with controlled context enrichment, a set of prompt substitution rules that systematically enriches distinct types of context: neutral padding, generic social background, descriptive decision grounding, and normative decision grounding. We address the second by introducing selective robustness as a validation criterion: insensitivity to meaning-preserving prompt variation combined with a directional response to decision-relevant changes in the social world. We demonstrate the framework in a Prisoner's Dilemma-like game, showing how it can be used to identify which forms of context enrichment produce more desirable and robust agent behavior. We find that these forms of enrichment produce distinct behavioral patterns that vary between the two models tested.

We present cuRoboV2-Fast, a GPU-accelerated planner that reduces both planning latency and execution time for collision-free, payload-aware, torque-limited motions. B-spline trajectory optimization reduces the required iterations, while accelerated robot computations and differentiable inverse dynamics reduce refinement cost and accommodate changing payloads. TimeOpt optimizes traversal speed along the fixed path under sampled velocity, acceleration, jerk, and torque constraints, exploiting local spline support to solve banded Newton systems efficiently on the GPU. With a 3,kg payload, cuRoboV2-Fast achieves 4.4 ms mean planning time on RTX 5090, 14.7x faster than cuRoboV2. Our method on Jetson AGX Orin plans faster than cuRoboV1 + TOPPRA on RTX 5090. A stereo-camera-based deployment on YAM achieves 5.93 s mean completed pick-and-drop cycles, 34.6% shorter than cuRoboV2. Code (Apache 2.0): www.github.com/NVlabs/curobo , Project Page: www.research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/curobov2-fast .