arXiv AI

Closed-Loop Neural Activation Control in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606. 00269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can be steered at test time by intervening on semantically meaningful internal directions, but existing methods use a fixed steering coefficient, effectively operating in open loop.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv AI
2d ago

DriftOPD: Sequence-Level Reverse-KL Distillation for One-Step VLA Policies

DriftOPD is a teacher‑free, rollout‑free framework that performs sequence‑level on‑policy distillation of continuous Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) action experts. It decomposes the sequence‑level reverse‑KL divergence into a chunk‑level reverse‑KL term and a future‑potential term, optimizing them with a one‑step drifting objective and a Q‑function critic learned from offline demonstrations. Experiments on multiple VLA architectures in simulation and real‑world manipulation show that DriftOPD outperforms existing one‑step distillation baselines while matching the task success of multi‑step teacher policies.

By Youngjun Jun, Kyumin Choi, Youngmin Kim, Seonghyun Jin, Sunwoo Park, Jangho Park, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

arXiv:2511. 18960v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep.

By Lei Xiao, Jifeng Li, Juntao Gao, Feiyang Ye, Yan Jin, Jingjing Qian, Jing Zhang, Yong Wu, Xiaoyuan Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 19

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

LoopVLA introduces a recurrent Vision‑Language‑Action architecture that learns to refine multimodal representations, predict actions, and estimate when further refinement is unnecessary. By iteratively applying a shared Transformer block and producing a sufficiency score at each step, it decouples refinement from fixed layer indices and aligns confidence scores with action quality through a self‑supervised objective. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, and VLA‑Arena demonstrate that LoopVLA reduces model parameters by 45% and boosts inference throughput up to 1.7× while matching or surpassing strong baselines in task success.

By Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

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 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 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