arXiv AI

InSight: Self-Guided Skill Acquisition via Steerable VLAs

arXiv:2606. 24884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Simple-to-Complex Structured Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605. 22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation.

By Weilong Guo, Yuchen Wang, Renping Zhou, Yunfeng Zhang, Rui Fang, Yuyang Pang, Wenda Xu, Gao Huang
arXiv AI
Jun 17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605. 31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments.

By Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu, Tianjian Wang, Youzhang He, Zitai Huang, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Hanyang Wang, Tianjiao Zhang, Munan Yin, Weihao Ding, Yi Xu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 08530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments.

By Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen, Shuai Dong, Jiajun Deng, Xin Zhang, Yuxuan Gao, Jiajia Wu, Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang, Xingyi Zhang, Jia Pan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.

By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
arXiv AI
Jun 16

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2605. 27284v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed.

By Xintong Hu, Xuhong Huang, Jinyu Zhang, Yutong Yao, Yuchong Sun, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Sicheng Xie, Yitao Liu, Junhao Chen, Yixuan Chen, Yingming Zheng, Shuai Bai, Tao Yu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 10

2AM: Grounding Agent-Side Memory as Guidance for Steerable Action Models in Long-Horizon Manipulation

The paper introduces 2AM, a system that keeps task memory solely within a multimodal Agent while using a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model to execute motions. By compiling interaction history into subtask language and optional 2D grasp/place/move hints, the Agent steers the Action Model, which is trained to tolerate imperfect guidance through dropout, noise, and jitter. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion without depth, geometry, or planners, vastly outperforming the best baseline.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Teaching Tiny VLA Models Where to Look and How to Move

arXiv:2607. 04171v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tiny Vision-Language-Action models are appealing for real-time robotic control, but reducing model scale often weakens two capabilities essential for manipulation: task-conditioned spatial grounding and coherent action generation.

By Iok Tong Lei, Ying Jie Yap, Wei Huang, Qingchen Xie, Qianzhi Li, Yujie Zhang, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng