arXiv AI

Adapting Vision-Language-Action Models to Unknown Visual Disruptions During Execution

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Reliability-Aware Future Conditioning for Temporally Robust Robot Manipulation

The paper introduces Reliability‑Aware Future Conditioning (RAFC), a method that dynamically estimates how much to trust a generated future video clip and selects the most appropriate temporal hypothesis for robot manipulation tasks. By treating temporal misalignment as a control problem rather than a generation problem, RAFC improves success rates on the CALVIN benchmark and a Franka robot under various timing mismatches, outperforming static and uniform‑averaging baselines. The approach builds on Future‑Experience Conditioning (FEC) and learns solely from task reward without explicit alignment supervision.

By Mohammad Khoshnazar, Mohammad Dehghani Tezerjani, Zhiyuan Gao, Deyuan Qu, Max Gandyra, Yanxiang Zhan, Mehreen Naeem, Andrew Melnik, Jeroen Schafer, Qing Yang, Michael Beetz
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

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.

By Shuaijun Liu, Feiyang You, Chengyu Wu, Shuyang Hao, Chenglong Zhang, Jingyao Cai, Xingwei Chen, Ningxin Su
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
Sep 10

LM-X: Explainable Vision--Language--Action Modeling via Progress, Event, and Uncertainty Prediction

arXiv:2608.25757v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale vision--language--action (VLA) policies have advanced generalist robot control, yet most remain stimulus-to-action black boxes: a...

By Jin Lou, Zhiyuan Jing, Xupeng Wang, Andong Chen, Xingdong Zhu, Yuexuan Li, Yuan Xu, Zhijie Zhu, Yingwei Ji, Wenpeng Nie, Renxing Feng, Liangliang Chen, Ying Chu, Jingyi Li, Jinyan Liu, Zhiqi Song, Jingxuan Zhu, Jidong Zhang, Yufei Liu, Boyang Xing, Lei Jiang, Yan Cui, Hongming Li, Yuchen Zhu
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 AI
Aug 3

ActFovea: Runtime Safeguarding for VLA Policies via Spatiotemporal Visual-Action Consistency

arXiv:2607. 29169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to runtime disturbances that break the temporal alignment among visual observations, robot states, and executed actions.

By Wenda Yu, Tianshi Wang, Fengling Li, Xin Li, Jingjing Li, Lei Zhu