arXiv AI

DreamAvoid: Critical-Phase Test-Time Dreaming to Avoid Failures in VLA Policies

DreamAvoid introduces a test‑time dreaming framework for Vision‑Language‑Action models to anticipate and avoid failures during critical manipulation phases. It uses a Dream Trigger to detect critical phases, samples candidate action chunks via an Action Proposer, and evaluates short‑horizon futures with a Dream Evaluator trained on success, failure, and boundary data. Experiments on real‑world and simulated tasks show DreamAvoid improves task success rates, achieving 72.5% success versus 48.8% for the base policy and 54.4% for GPC‑RANK.

arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

EVO-WAM: Evolving World Action Models through Video-Action Verification

arXiv:2609.38057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving robot policies on new tasks without collecting additional expert demonstrations remains a central challenge in robot learning. World action m...

By Shiyang Zhou, Xionghao Wu, Wenbo Li, Shenghe Zheng, Jiyao Zhang, Songsong Yu, Yijun Yang, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Senqiao Yang, Li Jiang, Jingyong Su, Haoyang Huang, Zhuotao Tian
arXiv AI
3d ago

Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.

By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.27450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models handle long-horizon manipulation, yet success hinges on a few precision-critical phases where millimeter-scale er...

By Weihui Zhao, Xiaohan Yan, Zunian Wan, Xuan Du, Zhaozhan Chi, Jianbo Mao, Ruipu Wu, Rushuai Yang, Houlin Li, Shukai Yang, Jing Wu, Yuxiang Yan, Yongcheng Liu, Chuankang Li, Guanghui Ren, Wei Shan, Maoqing Yao
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Prompt-Driven Exploration: Language as an Exploration Space for VLA Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607.08837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject...

By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
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
4d ago

F4R: Failure-Driven Recognition, Reconstruction, Refinement, and Redeployment for Continual Robot Self-Improvement

arXiv:2609.35575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrat...

By Zhuoyuan Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Liu, Yihua Ren, Peng Yu, Chen Bai, Ziheng Zhang, Yufei Jia, Jindou Jia, Yuhang Zhang, Xinrui Zhang, Shang Yujing, Yuxiang Chen, Chuhao Zhou, Tiancai Wang, Jianfei Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Q-Learning With World Models

The paper introduces QWM, a framework that integrates world models with standard Q‑learning to perform test‑time search over imagined trajectories. By training the policy and value function solely on real transitions, QWM avoids compounding model bias while still benefiting from predictive search. Experiments on the Robomimic and LIBERO manipulation benchmarks show that QWM outperforms strong prior state‑of‑the‑art methods in both sample efficiency and performance.

By Perry Dong, Yueru Jia, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
arXiv AI
Sep 7

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate Vision‑Language‑Action models on fine‑grained spatial reasoning and long‑horizon procedural planning. It contains 10 task categories, 56 base tasks, and 280 variants across five difficulty levels, with 527K trajectories collected from multiple embodiments and scenes. The benchmark introduces diagnostic metrics beyond binary success, revealing that current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise execution, and memory‑intensive planning.

By Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv AI
Sep 2

EmbodiedSkills: A Unified Framework for Orchestrating, Training, and Deploying VLA Agents

EmbodiedSkills is a unified framework that treats each skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites and verifying outcomes during long‑horizon vision‑language‑action tasks. It connects high‑level skill selection, bounded low‑level VLA execution, and post‑action verification through a fixed executable‑skill interface, enabling easy replacement of low‑level policies and recording of structured trajectories for supervision and adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3‑VL and OpenPI/pi0.5 on RoboTwin 2.0 and LIBERO, the framework achieves high success rates (86.20% and 97.40% respectively) and demonstrates effective memory‑dependent task performance.

By Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Tianwei Lin, Jinhao Mao, Zhenxuan Fan, Mingjian Gao, Yang Dai, Wentong Li, Zheqi Lv, Zheng Dong, Yingjie Niu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jun Xiao, Chao Li, Yueting Zhuang