arXiv AI

DEFLECT: Temporal Counterfactual Preference Learning for Delay-Robust Asynchronous VLAs

arXiv:2605. 19294v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies increasingly rely on asynchronous inference to hide large-model latency behind ongoing robot motion.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

Learning to Act While Waiting: RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latency

The paper introduces ARLI, a latency‑aware framework that enables reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of large generalist robot policies despite inference delays. ARLI combines asynchronous inference with state augmentations—incorporating committed actions and mid‑inference observations—to restore near‑Markovian dynamics and maintain reactivity. Experiments on simulated and real‑world manipulation tasks show that ARLI allows effective policy improvement under latency, outperforming standard RL even in no‑latency scenarios.

By Brian Zhu (Siemens), Momen Khalil (Siemens), E Harrison (UC Berkeley), Emanuele Poggi (Siemens), Philipp Schmitt (Siemens), Bernd Kast (Siemens), Philine Meister (Siemens), Pranav Atreya (UC Berkeley), Qiyang Li (UC Berkeley), Finn Ferchau (Siemens), Cesar Colmenero (Siemens), Yash Shahapurkar (Siemens), Gokul Narayanan (Siemens), Melih Erdogan (Siemens), Kai Wurm (Siemens), Georg von Wichert (Siemens), Oier Mees (Microsoft, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley), Eugen Solowjow (Siemens), Andrew Wagenmaker (UC Berkeley), Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
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
Aug 3

FBFM: A Training-Free Asynchronous Feedback Mechanism for Flow-Matching in World-Action Models Execution

arXiv:2607. 29235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although world-action models (WAMs) enhance long-horizon robot control by predicting visual evolution before acting, long-horizon reliability demands repeated re-grounding in real observations--not recursive rollout.

By Peize Li, Ruimeng Zhang, Ru Zhang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Efficient VLA Inference via Speculative Inference and Verification

arXiv:2608. 15636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in the field of embodied AI, but their high computational cost and limited predicted action length hinder real-time deployment.

By Chunyu Qi, Zhuoran Song, Jian Weng, Haozhe Jiang, Xueyuan Liu, Naifeng Jing, Guanghui He, Xiaoyao Liang, Haibing Guan
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
Aug 27

StreamPI: Streaming Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models

StreamPI introduces a streaming multimodal temporal modeling framework that enhances Vision‑Language‑Action models by adding temporal reasoning without extra parameters. It anchors each visual observation and language instruction pair as a temporal unit, using bidirectional attention for cross‑modal fusion and causal attention for autoregressive streaming inference. The method employs random‑interval streaming training to improve robustness and leverages the LLM backbone’s length extrapolation to inherit pretrained weights, achieving superior performance over pi0.5 on real‑robot and simulation tasks.

By Zhe Liu, Jinghua Hou, Yuxiang Lu, Zhenya Yang, Xianzhe Fan, Junwei Luo, Junyi Li, Ruihua Han, Zhi Hou, Hengshuang Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin‑Robotics introduces an omnimodal masked‑diffusion backbone, Dynin‑Omni, that jointly represents language, visual observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. By conditioning on different spans, the same model learns action prediction, next‑observation prediction, goal‑state prediction, and trajectory‑to‑instruction reconstruction, enabling test‑time scaling through goal prediction and action‑candidate evaluation. The system, pretrained on 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X‑Embodiment datasets, achieves competitive performance on LIBERO, zero‑shot LIBERO‑Plus, and a 78.4 % success rate on a Franka Research 3 robot, while a block‑parallel implementation speeds up action decoding by up to 29.2×.

By Hoeun Lee, Jaeik Kim, Jusang Oh, Jinhyeok Kim, Geon Choi, Hyeonggeun Kim, Jaeyoung Do