arXiv AI

CASD: Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Multi-StageRobot Manipulation

arXiv AI
Oct 2

FineART: Fine-Grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation

arXiv:2609.36416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must often execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isol...

By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Thomas Wolf, Jackson Lee, Pragna Mannam
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FineART: Fine-grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation

arXiv:2609.36416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions....

By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Jackson Lee, Thomas Wolf, Pragna Mannam
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Act with Intent: Distilling Behavior Intent for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Intention Distillation (INDI), a method that injects behavior-level intent into Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model decoders by leveraging a frozen teacher vision‑language model to interpret demonstrations. During training, the teacher processes the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and execution video, producing a multimodal intent representation that the VLA decoder uses alongside trajectory and execution features to predict actions. Experiments on SimplerEnv‑Bridge, RoboCasa Kitchen, and real‑world tasks show that INDI consistently improves success rates, especially on longer‑horizon tasks, demonstrating that explicit modeling of semantic intent benefits action decoders.

By Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han
arXiv AI
Oct 21

UniWALM: Unified World Action Language Model for Embodied Robot Control

UniWALM is a unified world-action-language model that jointly learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, using a mixture-of-transformers backbone with diffusion heads that co-denoise across modalities. By generating language as part of the same pass as action, the model closes a language‑as‑memory loop without an external planner, and introduces Flow Matching with Correction to maintain reliable action streams. Experiments show UniWALM outperforms baselines on compositional pick‑and‑place tasks and memory‑dependent benchmarks, and dramatically improves success on a real‑world Find‑the‑Item task when using generated textual memory.

By Rahul Sajnani, Diego Romeres, Mingyuan Zhang, Kai Gao, Carl Qi, Baichuan Huang, Srinath Sridhar, Dylan Randle, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jose Barreiros, Manikantan Nambi, Jeroen Vanbaar
arXiv AI
Oct 5

FastOPD: On-Policy Distillation for Lightweight VLA Deployment

FastOPD is a framework that distills large Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models into lightweight versions by using on‑policy distillation with a flow map and a self‑consistency objective. The method trains a compact student to mimic the teacher’s dynamics, achieving performance close to the teacher while drastically reducing inference steps. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real‑robot deployments show significant latency reductions and higher success rates compared to existing few‑step distillation baselines.

By Yoojin Oh, Jeongsol Kim, Yeonwoo Seo, Jangho Park, Seonghyun Jin, Sunwoo Park, Youngmin Kim, Youngjun Jun, Kyumin Choi, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv AI
Jul 29

CoTinyVLA: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for a Sub-Billion-Parameter Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv:2607. 25487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models translate natural-language commands into robot action sequences, but leading systems on the LIBERO-Plus robustness benchmark use three- to seven-billion-parameter backbones whose memory demands can exceed embedded robotic budgets.

By Minhyeok Lee, Chiyoung Kim, Chanhoe Gu, Seongrok Kim, Sanghyuk Roy Choi, Donghwan Hwang, Donghun Ryu, Seokhyun Kim