arXiv Computer Vision

OrthoSkillVLA: Continual Skill Learning via Gradient-Informed Skill Subspace Adaptation

arXiv:2608. 19589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained Vision-Language-Action models provide a strong foundation for robot learning, but sequentially adapting them to diverse skills can perturb the representations and velocity mappings used by previous skills, leading to catastrophic forgetting.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

LoopVLA introduces a recurrent Vision‑Language‑Action architecture that learns to refine multimodal representations, predict actions, and estimate when further refinement is unnecessary. By iteratively applying a shared Transformer block and producing a sufficiency score at each step, it decouples refinement from fixed layer indices and aligns confidence scores with action quality through a self‑supervised objective. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO‑Plus, and VLA‑Arena demonstrate that LoopVLA reduces model parameters by 45% and boosts inference throughput up to 1.7× while matching or surpassing strong baselines in task success.

By Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting

arXiv:2508. 04227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs), spanning predictive architectures to generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have revolutionized artificial intelligence through powerful cross-modal alignment and zero-shot generalization.

By Yuyang Liu, Qiuhe Hong, Linlan Huang, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Dipam Goswami, Tiantian Peng, Xialei Liu, Joost van de Weijer, Yonghong Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

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 AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations

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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

Simple Recipe Works: Vision-Language-Action Models are Natural Continual Learners with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603. 11653v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments.

By Jiaheng Hu, Jay Shim, Chen Tang, Yoonchang Sung, Bo Liu, Peter Stone, Roberto Martin-Martin