arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Appearance Shifts: Task-Semantic Action Calibration for VLA Models

The paper introduces BAS‑VLA, a task‑semantic action calibration framework for vision‑language‑action models that addresses two failure modes: unnecessary action drift under appearance changes and insufficient behavioral change under semantic alterations. BAS‑VLA uses a breaking‑centered calibration core and a selective evidence‑gated preserving auxiliary to maintain performance on clean and semantics‑preserving conditions while suppressing stale‑task behavior. Experiments on OpenPI‑pi0.5 and LIBERO‑Object Milk‑Swap show high success rates on clean and preserved tasks, a dramatic drop under target‑object swaps, and improved robustness to style shifts from 42% to 70% without harming clean performance.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

When Vision Overrides Language: Evaluating and Mitigating Counterfactual Failures in VLAs

Vision‑Language‑Action models (VLAs) often fail to follow language instructions because they rely on vision shortcuts learned from biased datasets. The authors introduce LIBERO‑CF, a counterfactual benchmark that tests language following by providing alternative task instructions for the same scene layouts, revealing widespread counterfactual failures. They propose Counterfactual Action Guidance (CAG), a dual‑branch inference scheme that amplifies language conditioning, which consistently improves language grounding and task success across diverse VLAs without requiring extra data or architectural changes.

By Yu Fang, Yuchun Feng, Dong Jing, Jiaqi Liu, Yue Yang, Zhenyu Wei, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 1

VLA-Trace: Diagnosing Vision-Language-Action Models through Representation and Behavior Tracing

arXiv:2605.30117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models transform multimodal knowledge into embodied control remains an open challenge. We present VL...

By Haoyuan Shi, Xiancong Ren, Yingji Zhang, Qinfan Zhang, Jiayu Hu, Haozhe Shan, Han Dong, Jinpeng Lu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
arXiv AI
Jun 2

VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.

By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

From Pixels to Actions - Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper introduces NEO-VLA, an encoder‑free vision‑language‑action framework that tokenizes images with lightweight patch convolutions and lets visual and language features evolve together throughout the backbone. By allowing a flow‑matching action expert to access instruction‑conditioned visual representations at multiple depths, NEO‑VLA consistently outperforms encoder‑based counterparts across diverse manipulation tasks and distribution shifts. Layer‑wise probing reveals that action‑critical signals peak early in the visual hierarchy, underscoring the benefit of accessing representations across the computational pipeline rather than relying on a fixed encoder output.

By Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Penghao Wu, Siyuan Hu, Ziqi Huang, Tianqi Liu, Mingze Sun, Ziyi Wang, Zhongang Cai, Hanming Deng, Quan Wang, Lei Yang, Lewei Lu, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

V-Link: Recovering Lost Visual Representations in Action DiT for Vision-Language-Action Models

V-Link is a method designed to enhance Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models by recovering visual representations during the transfer from vision‑language (VL) features to action (A) features. It introduces complementary Spatial and Semantic Query representations that are injected into Action DiT through asymmetric pathways, providing both semantic augmentation and dedicated geometric conditioning for action generation. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, RoboTwin 2.0, and real‑world AGIBOT A3 Ultra tasks show significant performance gains over the base GR00T N1.6 model.

By Yehao Lu, Jiarui Yang, Yuning Su, Yufeng Xie, Yu Zhong, Yazhou Zhang, Haiyu Lan, Kaixiang Lu, Peiwen Lin, Chuang Wang, Zequn Qin, Enyu Li, Xi Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

D$^2$-VLA: Dual-Memory Dual-Frequency Vision-Language-Action Model For Long Dynamic Manipulation

arXiv:2609.34792v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation requires robots to remember cues that are no longer in view while responding to moving objects. Yet vision-language-actio...

By Zijian Ye, Chengqi Wei, Wei Huang, Anlin Zheng, Chunyu Zou, Liangyu Wu, Zikang Zhao, Zhenjie Peng, Yushuo Yang, Shuman Zhao, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

DynamicVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Dynamic Object Manipulation

DynamicVLA is a latency‑aware Vision‑Language‑Action model designed for dynamic object manipulation, featuring a compact 0.4B architecture and a convolutional vision encoder for efficient multimodal inference. It employs a continuous inference schedule that overlaps reasoning and execution, and a Latent‑aware Action Streaming mechanism that discards stale action prefixes to maintain action‑time alignment. The authors also introduce the Dynamic Object Manipulation (DOM) benchmark, comprising 200K synthetic episodes and 2K real‑world episodes, and demonstrate that DynamicVLA improves dynamic manipulation success in simulation and on real robots.

By Haozhe Xie, Beichen Wen, Jiarui Zheng, Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, Haiwen Diao, Ziwei Liu