arXiv AI

Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?

arXiv:2606. 27755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-driven robotic manipulation, but they inherit oversized language backbones from pretrained VLMs whose capacity far exceeds what is needed for short robotic instructions.

arXiv AI
Jul 13

CLAP: Direct VLM-to-VLA Adaptation via Language-Action Grounding

arXiv:2607. 08974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) inherit semantic capabilities from pretrained VLMs, yet large-scale post-training on robot data and architectural modifications can reshape the backbone so extensively that it becomes difficult to isolate what the VLM contributes to control.

By Yuri Ishitoya, Jeremy Siburian, Masashi Hamaya, Kuniaki Saito, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Mai Nishimura
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

By Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

TurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM

Vision-language-action (VLA) models commonly adopt an LLM-centric $V \to L \to A$ pathway, where visual observations are projected into the representation space of a large language model before being decoded into robot actions. Although effective, this design incurs substantial computation and memory overhead at every policy invocation.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606. 20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference.

By Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Tung M. Luu, Trung Le, Tran Nguyen Le, Minh Vu, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

XS-VLA: Coupling Coarse-grained Spatial Distillation with Latent Flow Matching for Lightweight Robotic Control

arXiv:2607. 04171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong multimodal understanding and spatial grounding, but their computational cost limits real-time robotic control.

By Lei Iok Tong, Qingchen Xie, Wei Huang, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Qianzhi Li, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng