arXiv Computer Vision

Towards Zero-Shot Transfer Across Embodiments For Driving VLAs

The paper investigates how Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models can generalise across different driving environments and camera setups. It introduces a multi‑dataset training strategy and an auxiliary objective called BEV‑Forcing, which injects bird‑eye‑view spatial information into the VLA backbone to improve both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution performance on a limited number of camera rigs. The authors observe that while BEV‑Forcing helps when training data is scarce, its advantage diminishes as the number of training embodiments grows, suggesting that scaling diversity may reduce the impact of such auxiliary tasks.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

Correcting WHERE, Preserving HOW: Compositional Generalization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Referential Guidance

arXiv:2609.38616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable flexible action generation, their generalization across diverse environmental elements, including ma...

By Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Mohsen Hariri, Debargha Ganguly, Wang Yang, Kai Ye, Bryce Grant, Vipin Chaudhary, Yu Yin
arXiv AI
Jun 2

VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.

By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
arXiv AI
3d ago

EmbodiedMidtrain: Bridging the Gap between Vision-Language Models and Vision-Language-Action Models via Mid-training

EmbodiedMidtrain bridges the gap between Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) and Vision‑Language‑Action Models (VLAs) by first analyzing the distribution mismatch between their data. It introduces a lightweight proximity estimator that selects VLA‑aligned samples from a large VLM pool, creating the EmbodiedMidtrain‑1M dataset used to mid‑train VLMs before VLA fine‑tuning. Experiments on simulated and real‑world robot tasks show consistent performance gains across different VLM backbones and VLA action heads, with early training steps already benefiting from the improved initialization.

By Yiyang Du, Zhanqiu Guo, Haochen Zhang, Annabella Macaluso, Xin Ye, Liu Ren, Yonatan Bisk, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces VLAct, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that focuses on representation‑centric continued pre‑training rather than merely scaling robot data. VLAct is trained on diverse, multi‑embodiment robot data and preserves a broad VLM prior while encouraging shared action semantics across embodiments. Experiments across simulation, real‑world, and unseen‑embodiment settings show that VLAct consistently outperforms existing industrial VLA systems, achieving high success rates with only a modest compute budget and open‑source data.

By Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen, Zixuan Wang, Longxiang Tang, Haokun Gui, Jinhui Ye, Changsheng Lu, Xiaoyang Wu, Mingkang Zhu, Pengguang Chen, Shu Liu, Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?

arXiv:2507. 06219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood.

By Modi Shi, Li Chen, Jin Chen, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li
arXiv AI
Jun 3

See Less, Specify More: Visual Evidence Budgets for Generalizable VLAs

arXiv:2606. 02735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control.

By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

PoseVLA: Universal Pose Pretraining for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2602. 19710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often suffer from feature collapse and low training efficiency because they entangle high-level perception with sparse, embodiment-specific action supervision.

By Haitao Lin, Hanyang Yu, Jingshun Huang, He Zhang, Yonggen Ling, Ping Tan, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Decoupling the Declarative from the Procedural in Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces w$^{2}$VLA, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that restructures information flow to separate declarative knowledge (concepts and entity semantics) from procedural knowledge (how to act). By modulating the robot state sequence with visual, spatial, and skill information in a compositional, interpretable way, the model achieves robust behavior cloning and unprecedented zero‑shot skill transfer to unseen objects, overcoming brittleness seen in current state‑of‑the‑art VLA models.

By Nikolaos Tsagkas, Andreas Sochopoulos, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Oisin Mac Aodha, Alexandros Kouris
arXiv AI
Aug 13

G0.5: One Autoregressive Stream for Robot Reasoning and Action

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