arXiv Machine Learning

TERRA: Learning Transportable Latent Actions through Temporal Effect Representation and Relational Alignment

arXiv AI
Aug 24

ForeTime-VLA: Causal Future-Token Distillation from a World Action Model for Conveyor-Belt Manipulation

ForeTime‑VLA is a causal vision‑language‑action policy that distills future‑aware representations from a frozen Fast‑WAM teacher, enabling it to anticipate contact events during conveyor‑belt manipulation. The method compresses current and future video latents into a 64‑dimensional target, uses an eight‑frame history encoder to predict this target along with manipulation phase and time‑to‑transition, and conditions a VLM prefix on future tokens and phase. On a deduplicated conveyor‑belt dataset, ForeTime‑VLA reduces test MAE by 2.63% and L2 by 3.02%, while real‑robot experiments show significantly higher grasp success rates compared to the next‑best reference. whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that distilling future‑token knowledge from a world‑action model can improve dynamic manipulation performance without the computational cost of running the teacher at inference time."

By Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang
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