arXiv AI

Measuring the Stability Assumption Behind Action Chunking

The paper investigates how small action errors evolve when using action chunking in behavioural cloning. By injecting errors at each state and observing their growth under open‑loop (no replanning) and closed‑loop (replanning) regimes, the authors classify states as contracting, expanding, or unresolved. Across twelve manipulation tasks, they find that stable states are rare, error amplification is common, and that short‑horizon fitting can overestimate long‑horizon propagation. Predictors trained on camera and proprioceptive data can recover open‑loop stability but only partially capture closed‑loop dynamics, indicating that standard imitation learning does not reliably produce policies that contract errors when perturbed.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

ValueFormer: A Causal Transformer Value Function with Stage-Aware Labels for Semi-Autonomous Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2608. 02958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies trained by behavior cloning fail silently: from the action stream alone, a collapsing rollout looks much like one making clean progress, because imitation supplies no notion of progress.

By Inkyu Sa, Konstantin Stulov, Rajat Bhageria
arXiv AI
2d ago

DriftOPD: Sequence-Level Reverse-KL Distillation for One-Step VLA Policies

DriftOPD is a teacher‑free, rollout‑free framework that performs sequence‑level on‑policy distillation of continuous Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) action experts. It decomposes the sequence‑level reverse‑KL divergence into a chunk‑level reverse‑KL term and a future‑potential term, optimizing them with a one‑step drifting objective and a Q‑function critic learned from offline demonstrations. Experiments on multiple VLA architectures in simulation and real‑world manipulation show that DriftOPD outperforms existing one‑step distillation baselines while matching the task success of multi‑step teacher policies.

By Youngjun Jun, Kyumin Choi, Youngmin Kim, Seonghyun Jin, Sunwoo Park, Jangho Park, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv AI
Aug 3

FBFM: A Training-Free Asynchronous Feedback Mechanism for Flow-Matching in World-Action Models Execution

arXiv:2607. 29235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although world-action models (WAMs) enhance long-horizon robot control by predicting visual evolution before acting, long-horizon reliability demands repeated re-grounding in real observations--not recursive rollout.

By Peize Li, Ruimeng Zhang, Ru Zhang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen, Shanghang Zhang