arXiv Machine Learning

TAVIS: A Benchmark for Egocentric Active Vision and Anticipatory Gaze in Imitation Learning

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

INSPECT: Learning Robot View Selection from Assistant Use

INSPECT is a system that learns how a robot should choose its camera view during assembly inspection by observing a smart‑glasses assistant that answers part queries and guides the user. It uses techniques such as Presence‑Invariant TwinSwap for object evidence calibration, claim‑indexed supervision to separate evidence needs from camera changes, and object‑centered calibration to adapt view preferences to robot poses. In experiments on gearbox assemblies and angle‑grinder recordings, INSPECT outperforms other non‑oracle policies, improving view utility and decision accuracy.

By Di Wen, Kailun Yang, Wenhao Guo, Yitian Shi, Junwei Zheng, Yufan Chen, Ruiping Liu, Jiale Wei, Rania Rayyes, Kunyu Peng
arXiv AI
Jun 3

See Less, Specify More: Visual Evidence Budgets for Generalizable VLAs

arXiv:2606. 02735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control.

By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models

GlanceWAM introduces a sparse test‑time imagination approach for world‑action models that decouples visual imagination from control. By asynchronously generating a single lookahead frame on a slow clock and decoding action chunks at a 48 ms control rate purely in latent space, it avoids latency while maintaining high success. The method achieves 72.2 % on the RoboCasa kitchen benchmark and 99.0 % on LIBERO, running 24× faster than synchronous baselines.

By Linhan Wang, Zijian An, Mingyuan Zhang, Chen Dai, Yi Xu, Can Cui, Zichong Yang, Yinlin Chen, Lifeng Zhou, Chang-Tien Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

When Instructions Retrieve Trajectories: Diagnosing and Mitigating Generalization Failures in VLA Models

The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.

By Hung-Jen Chen, Yu-Hsun Hou, Yan-Hong Chen, Yan-Fu Chen, Binghua Cai, Min Sun, Chun-Yi Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.

By Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu, Abdeslam Boularias
arXiv AI
Sep 21

SynthDemo-RL: Breaking the Zero-Reward Barrier in VLA Adaptation with LLM-Guided Synthetic Demonstrations

SynthDemo‑RL introduces a teacher‑student framework that uses an automated teacher to generate successful manipulation trajectories from simulator‑privileged state, which are then distilled into a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) student via supervised fine‑tuning. The student is further refined with PPO using binary task‑success rewards. On the LIBERO‑PRO benchmark, SynthDemo‑RL rescues all 27 previously unsolvable tasks and achieves near‑perfect success rates, matching performance that would otherwise require human demonstrations.

By Hiroaki Kingetsu, Hiroaki Kurihara, Kaoru Yokoo, Kenji Fukumizu, Manohar Kaul
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Outcome-Conditioned End-Effector Geometry Across Vision-Language-Action Policies

The study examines how different vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies execute a manipulation task by comparing the geometry of their end‑effectors across 15,000 closed‑loop LIBERO rollouts. By pairing 3,600 configuration‑matched policy executions, the authors find that when both policies succeed, their end‑effector trajectories are much closer (median DTW distance 0.0120 m) than when only one succeeds (0.0380 m), a pattern consistent across all tasks, policy pairs, and nine representations. Even successful executions remain as far from same‑task demonstrations as the demonstrations are from each other, indicating that task‑associated geometry, rather than training data overlap, drives these differences.

By Xingyu Lin, Zhuang Li, Zhongrun Wu, Shouquan Zhou, Dehui Du