arXiv AI

PaCo-VLA: Passivity-Shielded Compliance Prior for Contact-Rich Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 00515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation demands both high-level semantic reasoning and the safe regulation of high-frequency contact dynamics.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

FWBC-VLA: Force-Aware Whole-Body Compensation for Contact-Rich Loco-Manipulation

FWBC‑VLA is a force‑aware framework that links vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with whole‑body compensation control for wheeled‑legged robots. It introduces HSR‑Force, a sensorless residual‑torque estimator that infers contact strength and encodes this information as tokens for the VLA action decoder, allowing the policy to detect contact onset, loading, and release. The system fine‑tunes a pretrained VLA backbone on a large WL&Arm dataset, combines proprioceptive, Jacobian‑derived force, and contact estimates to generate corrective actions, and demonstrates effectiveness in real‑world tasks such as whiteboard wiping and door opening.

By Yutian Zhang, Siyuan Ma, Liwen Yang, Yang Li, Ce Hao, Haozhen Chi, Dong We, Qiaojun Yu, Dibo Hou
arXiv AI
Jun 4

VISTA: Vision-Grounded and Physics-Validated Adaptation of UMI data for VLA Training

arXiv:2606. 04708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging.

By Siyuan Yang, Linzheng Guo, Ouyang Lu, Zhaxizhuoma, Daoran Zhang, Xinmiao Wang, Ting Xiao, Fangzheng Yan, Zhijun Chen, Yan Ding, Chao Yu, Chenjia Bai, Xuelong Li
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
Jul 17

Never Too Late for Force: Accelerating VLA Post-Training with Reactive Force Injection

arXiv:2607. 14236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong language-conditioned manipulation knowledge, but they remain largely vision-driven and can struggle once manipulation enters contact states where the scene is occluded, depth is ambiguous, or small force errors push execution off the offline demonstration distribution.

By Yi Wang, Wendi Chen, Zimo Wen, Han Xue, Xueqi Li, Wenye Yu, Zhijie Chen, Hao Yang, Jun Lv, Chuan Wen, Cewu Lu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

VISTA: Vision-Grounded and Physics-Validated Adaptation of UMI data for VLA Training

Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging. We identify two critical mismatches: wrist-mounted fisheye views, with severe radial distortion and local gripper-centric perspectives, are out-of-distribution for pretrained VLMs; and human-collected trajectories frequently violate kinematic limits, incur collisions, or exceed controller bandwidth, teaching VLA policies physically infeasible actions.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

ForceFlow: Learning to Feel and Act via Contact-Driven Flow Matching

ForceFlow is a force-aware reactive framework that uses flow matching to improve contact-rich manipulation. It fuses force signals asymmetrically, treats force as a global regulator, and employs a joint prediction paradigm to couple force and motion. The approach splits tasks into a vision-dominant localization stage and a touch-dominant execution stage, using a Vision-to-Force handover to separate spatial generalization from contact regulation.

By Shuoheng Zhang, Yifu Yuan, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Qiaojun Yu, Pengyi Li, Guowei Huang, Helong Huang, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Beyond Appearance Shifts: Task-Semantic Action Calibration for VLA Models

The paper introduces BAS‑VLA, a task‑semantic action calibration framework for vision‑language‑action models that addresses two failure modes: unnecessary action drift under appearance changes and insufficient behavioral change under semantic alterations. BAS‑VLA uses a breaking‑centered calibration core and a selective evidence‑gated preserving auxiliary to maintain performance on clean and semantics‑preserving conditions while suppressing stale‑task behavior. Experiments on OpenPI‑pi0.5 and LIBERO‑Object Milk‑Swap show high success rates on clean and preserved tasks, a dramatic drop under target‑object swaps, and improved robustness to style shifts from 42% to 70% without harming clean performance.

By Shuaijun Liu, Feiyang You, Chengyu Wu, Shuyang Hao, Chenglong Zhang, Jingyao Cai, Xingwei Chen, Ningxin Su