arXiv Machine Learning

Ordered Action Tokens for Visuomotor Policy Learning

arXiv:2607. 21670v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action tokenization maps continuous robot action chunks to discrete tokens and has become an important interface for modern visuomotor policies.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

ActionPiece: Rethinking Action Tokenization for Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action Models

ActionPiece rethinks how actions are tokenized for autoregressive vision‑language‑action models by introducing physical rank consistency (PRC) to evaluate relational fidelity of reconstructed actions. The method jointly supervises representation learning and quantization to preserve local physical distance rankings, improving both PRC and policy success. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, SimplerEnv, and VLA‑Arena show significant gains over baseline tokenizers.

By Shijie Lian, Bin Yu, Zhaolong Shen, Xiaopeng Lin, Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Laurence T. Yang, Kai Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

Direction-Scale Decomposition in Action Representation: Rethinking What to Tokenize for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Direction-Scale Decomposition (DSD), an action representation that separates translation and rotation increments into direction and scale components before tokenization. DSD is evaluated with uniform binning and a B-spline tokenizer (BEAST) in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, showing improved success rates on LIBERO and SimplerEnv, especially under mixed-dataset training. Real-robot experiments confirm performance gains with and without robotics pretraining, supporting DSD as an effective representation for discrete-token vision-language-action models.

By Yufei Duan, Hang Yin, Alberta Longhini, Chao Tang, Danica Kragic
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

RotVLA: Rotational Latent Action for Vision-Language-Action Model

RotVLA introduces a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that replaces discrete latent action encoding with a continuous rotational latent action representation on the group SO(n). This design provides continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry that better capture real‑world action dynamics, and a triplet frame learning scheme enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while preventing degeneration. Trained with 1.7 B parameters on large cross‑embodiment datasets, RotVLA achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin2.0 benchmarks and shows strong real‑world manipulation results.

By Qiwei Li, Xicheng Gong, Xinghang Li, Peiyan Li, Quanyun Zhou, Hangjun Ye, Jiahuan Zhou, Yadong Mu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.

By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
arXiv AI
Aug 19

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

LoopVLA introduces a recurrent Vision‑Language‑Action architecture that learns to refine multimodal representations, predict actions, and estimate when further refinement is unnecessary. By iteratively applying a shared Transformer block and producing a sufficiency score at each step, it decouples refinement from fixed layer indices and aligns confidence scores with action quality through a self‑supervised objective. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, and VLA‑Arena demonstrate that LoopVLA reduces model parameters by 45% and boosts inference throughput up to 1.7× while matching or surpassing strong baselines in task success.

By Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606. 20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference.

By Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Tung M. Luu, Trung Le, Tran Nguyen Le, Minh Vu, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien
arXiv AI
Sep 18

M2Tok: Multi-head Multi-codebook Discrete Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces M2Tok, a Multi-head Multi-codebook Action Tokenizer that reduces reconstruction loss for continuous action signals by decomposing latent features into multiple heads and assigning independent codebooks to each. This design expands representational expressivity, leading to lower reconstruction error and higher success rates in Vision‑Language‑Action models evaluated on RoboTwin, Simpler‑Env, and zero‑shot real‑world tasks. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both multi‑head and multi‑codebook mechanisms.

By Chunpu Xu, Zhixuan Liang, Yuhao Zhang, Chi-Min Chan, Jessie Wang, Yang Xiao, Mengkang Hu, Xiaokang Yang, Yao Mu