arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

Correcting WHERE, Preserving HOW: Compositional Generalization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Referential Guidance

arXiv:2609.38616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable flexible action generation, their generalization across diverse environmental elements, including ma...

By Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Mohsen Hariri, Debargha Ganguly, Wang Yang, Kai Ye, Bryce Grant, Vipin Chaudhary, Yu Yin
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 AI
Jun 4

Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation

arXiv:2606. 04046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control.

By Boyuan Xiao, Bohong Chen, Yumeng Li, Ji Feng, Yao-Xiang Ding, Kun Zhou
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Towards Neuro-Symbolic Procedural Reasoning for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

The paper proposes a neuro‑symbolic framework that augments vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with explicit task graphs and multimodal procedural memory to handle long‑horizon manipulation tasks. Task graphs encode action dependencies, valid transitions, and branch conditions, while memory tracks the active step, completed actions, textual context, and relevant visual evidence. Human demonstrations provide spatial and temporal guidance via gaze or saliency cues, which are annotated in robot‑view teleoperation videos and used to fine‑tune VLA models. The approach is evaluated on workspace clearing and surgical‑instrument handling tasks, measuring object and destination selection, subtask completion, task progress, step‑order consistency, overall success, and procedural or execution mistakes.

By Vivek Chavan, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann, Kevin Haninger, J\"org Kr\"uger
arXiv AI
Jun 16

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2605. 27284v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed.

By Xintong Hu, Xuhong Huang, Jinyu Zhang, Yutong Yao, Yuchong Sun, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Sicheng Xie, Yitao Liu, Junhao Chen, Yixuan Chen, Yingming Zheng, Shuai Bai, Tao Yu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Towards Zero-Shot Transfer Across Embodiments For Driving VLAs

The paper investigates how Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models can generalise across different driving environments and camera setups. It introduces a multi‑dataset training strategy and an auxiliary objective called BEV‑Forcing, which injects bird‑eye‑view spatial information into the VLA backbone to improve both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution performance on a limited number of camera rigs. The authors observe that while BEV‑Forcing helps when training data is scarce, its advantage diminishes as the number of training embodiments grows, suggesting that scaling diversity may reduce the impact of such auxiliary tasks.

By Caio Azevedo, Stefano Sabatini, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

arXiv:2606. 15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute.

By Jeongeun Park, Juhan Park, Taekyung Kim, Sungjoon Choi, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Training-Free Interaction-Aligned Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Embodied Manipulation

The paper introduces Interaction‑Aligned Pruning (IAprune), a training‑free method for visual token pruning in embodied manipulation tasks. IAprune jointly decides per‑frame budget and token selection, using semantic‑motion spatial agreement to choose between conservative and aggressive coverage, and applies geometric residual correction to focus on under‑represented boundaries. Experiments on four policies, three simulation benchmarks, and a real‑robot platform show that IAprune matches unpruned performance on LIBERO while achieving up to 1.54× speed‑up and 1.48× acceleration on a real robot.

By Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li, Haozhe Wang, Gang Wang, Yipu Zhang, Xiaoyu Tang, Jin Wu, Xieyuanli Chen, Yunhui Liu, Wei Zhang
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 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