arXiv AI

Completion at the Boundary (CaB): Deployable Switching with Completion-Aware Control under Limited Calibration

arXiv:2606. 00145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) agents can execute natural-language instructions, yet deployed systems still lack an operational interface: deciding when the instruction is complete.

arXiv AI
Jun 29

Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?

arXiv:2606. 27755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-driven robotic manipulation, but they inherit oversized language backbones from pretrained VLMs whose capacity far exceeds what is needed for short robotic instructions.

By Guoheng Sun, Kaixi Feng, Shwai He, Xiaochuan Gong, Yexiao He, Ziyao Wang, Zheyu Shen, Wanghao Ye, Ramana Rao Kompella, Gaowen Liu, Ang Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv AI
Jun 3

See Less, Specify More: Visual Evidence Budgets for Generalizable VLAs

arXiv:2606. 02735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control.

By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
arXiv AI
Jul 14

AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?

arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.

By Xun Liu, Yi Evie Zhang, Vira Kasprova, Parisa Rabbani, Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Tianyu Zhang, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

By Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
arXiv AI
Jun 11

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

arXiv:2606. 12402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability.

By Jadelynn Dao, Milan Ganai, Yasmina Abukhadra, Ajay Sridhar, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Katie Luo, Clark Barrett, Jiajun Wu, Chelsea Finn, Marco Pavone