HiSTEVE 1.0: Harnessing Human-Interface VLA Agents for Open-World Games

Building virtual embodied agents that operate in open-ended games like human players is a long-standing goal requiring both long-horizon autonomy and reliable native-interface control.

As a procedurally generated open world, Minecraft provides a natural testbed for studying the integration of these capabilities.

Existing agents typically provide either native visuomotor control without long-horizon autonomy or high-level planning executed through environment APIs or predefined skills.

To bridge this gap, we propose HiSTEVE, a hierarchical VLA agent with a capability-aware agent harness.

At the orchestration level, we equip the harness with structured memory for tracking progress and a VLM planner for selecting subtasks within the VLA's capabilities.

To reliably determine subtask completion, we further introduce a policy-coupled task completion state detector that conditions on VLA policy context to signal candidate completion.

At the control level, a single VLA executes all subtasks with vision-only perception and native keyboard-and-mouse actions.

To mitigate interference between heterogeneous GUI and non-GUI interactions, we introduce regime-specific RMSNorm branches and separate mouse-movement token embeddings.

We also train the VLA through world knowledge injection, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with environment feedback to improve reliability and recovery.

HiSTEVE achieves state-of-the-art atomic-task performance, scoring 85.0% on MineStudio Bench and a 37.4% average success rate on OpenHA, while also completing long-horizon tasks such as crafting an iron pickaxe from scratch like human players.