arXiv:2610.08183v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multi-task manipulation policies differ in architecture, scale, and pretrained priors all at once, so published comparisons cannot attribute performa...
By Nanhe Chen, Runqiu Yang, Jiawei Tang, Sichao Liu, Yuquan Wang
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao
The paper introduces a framework for Flow‑Matching Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that allows independent adjustment of backbone depth, action expert depth, and denoising steps. Lightweight Exit Transformers are added at intermediate layers to enable early exits, and a KV Cache synthesis mechanism manages skipped layers so the action expert can exit deeper than the backbone. Experiments on SmolVLA and π0.5 across LIBERO and Meta‑World show that joint tuning of these compute axes reduces latency by 79.2 % and FLOPs by 31.8 %, while improving mean success rate by 5.6 %.
By Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Matteo Matteucci, Alessandro Suglia
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:2607. 18236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning.
By Gaoyue Zhou, Zichen Jeff Cui, Ada Langford, Bowen Tan, Yann LeCun, Lerrel Pinto
The paper argues that diffusion-based action policies can use a frozen, observation‑free backbone as a reusable trajectory prior, with task adaptation handled entirely by the conditioning pathway. By pretraining a general action head on forward‑kinematics data and then freezing it, the authors show that a single backbone can match or outperform normally trained models on MimicGen and LIBERO. Their experiments reveal that a small 5 M‑parameter MLP backbone can rival large U‑Net and transformer backbones, indicating that action backbones are often over‑parameterized and that image‑style architectures may not be the best fit for low‑dimensional action generation.
By Jian Zhou, Sihao Lin, Shuai Fu, Zerui Li, Gengze Zhou, Qi WU
arXiv:2610.13262v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Memory-dependent manipulation requires a policy to track execution state and recover visual evidence that is no longer observable. We propose dual-st...
By Yang Wang, Ping Liu, Ruiyu Wang, Xuhua Chen, Lingfeng Zhang, Tao Zhang
Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial detail and the benefits of large-scale visual pre-training.
arXiv:2606. 30113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete action tokenization provides a compact interface for autoregressive VLA policies, but accurately recovering continuous robot actions from discrete codes remains challenging.
By Tengyue Jiang, Chunpu Xu, Jiayue Kang, Yao Mu
Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models often inherit the image-generation view: actions are generated by iterative denoising. We argue that VLA action generation has a different condition-target structure: the policy is conditioned on rich observations, language, and state, but predicts only a compact, low-dimensional action chunk.
arXiv:2606. 05737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models often inherit the image-generation view: actions are generated by iterative denoising.
By Yitong Chen, Shiduo Zhang, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu
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