The paper introduces CARE, a method for certifying accelerated inference in vision‑language‑action models. CARE uses paired rollouts on a calibration set to guarantee that the risk of acceleration‑induced failure stays below a user‑specified budget, selecting the fastest certified accelerator or falling back to the reference policy. Experiments on LIBERO suites show that CARE achieves 9.0–10.8× speedups while preserving at least 85.8% of reference‑solved episodes with 95% confidence, and it outperforms non‑guaranteed selectors in both budget adherence and rollout efficiency.
While vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly, running them at every control step remains expensive. Prior work accelerates VLA inference using techniques like action chunking and vi...
The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.
arXiv:2606. 29699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Action models combine perception, language grounding, and control in a single policy, but their failures are hard to diagnose once visual conditions shift.
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
VLCP (Vision Language Control Policy) is a training‑free robot manipulation approach that keeps a vision‑language model (VLM) frozen and uses it to generate short Python control functions. Unlike traditional methods that retry a fixed policy, VLCP rewrites the control code every K steps based on multi‑view RGB, proprioceptive state, and state delta, allowing failures to be corrected within the same episode. In a 57‑task MuJoCo/RoboVerse benchmark, VLCP achieves 35.1% pooled success versus 3.5% for a single‑query baseline, with a 27.3% within‑episode recovery rate on failed grasps and efficient token usage.
arXiv:2610.00604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action policies often see only one or a few recent frames, which makes it difficult to evaluate how they use information that disappe...
arXiv:2610.10526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are strikingly sensitive to instruction phrasing and do not inherit the language robustness of the vision-langua...
VLA-FAIL introduces a lightweight framework for detecting failures in vision-language-action models used in robotic manipulation. It combines two novel detectors: the first-layer Mahalanobis distance (LLMD) identifies out-of-distribution states by comparing token-wise deviations in last-layer features to training data, while the second, action chunk consistency (ACC), detects failures by spotting inconsistencies between consecutive action chunks in receding-horizon control. The authors also propose a threshold‑independent metric, “AUCPDT,” to evaluate detection accuracy and latency, and show through real‑world and simulation experiments that LLMD and ACC together provide reliable and early failure detection, outperforming more expensive baseline methods.
arXiv:2609.21216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies based on flow matching generate action chunks through repeated evaluations of an action expert. Increasing the...
arXiv:2609.13308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion evaluation found that naming the target part in a manipulation prompt increased action accuracy by 0.32-0.63 across eight vision-language...
The study examines how different vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies execute a manipulation task by comparing the geometry of their end‑effectors across 15,000 closed‑loop LIBERO rollouts. By pairing 3,600 configuration‑matched policy executions, the authors find that when both policies succeed, their end‑effector trajectories are much closer (median DTW distance 0.0120 m) than when only one succeeds (0.0380 m), a pattern consistent across all tasks, policy pairs, and nine representations. Even successful executions remain as far from same‑task demonstrations as the demonstrations are from each other, indicating that task‑associated geometry, rather than training data overlap, drives these differences.
arXiv:2605. 21854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly converged on a small set of architectural patterns: discrete-token autoregression (e.