arXiv AI
Jul 7
Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv:2510. 05681v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in robot control.
DiVeR: Decision-Critical Verifier Learning for VLA Test-Time Scaling
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arXiv AI
Jun 12
SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv:2602. 04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training.
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.
arXiv AI
Aug 19
Q-Learning With World Models
The paper introduces QWM, a framework that integrates world models with standard Q‑learning to perform test‑time search over imagined trajectories. By training the policy and value function solely on real transitions, QWM avoids compounding model bias while still benefiting from predictive search. Experiments on the Robomimic and LIBERO manipulation benchmarks show that QWM outperforms strong prior state‑of‑the‑art methods in both sample efficiency and performance.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models
The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.
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.
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.
arXiv AI
Oct 15
EmbodiedSkills: World Action Model-augmented Cascaded Skills for Vision-Language-Action Agent
EmbodiedSkills is a skill-based agent framework that enhances frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies with world action models for consequence‑aware action selection. It defines reusable skills for observation, context encoding, candidate generation, consequence prediction, outcome evaluation, candidate comparison, and action execution, organized into five stages that support both continuous action chunks and pick‑and‑place primitives. The framework improves success rates on MetaWorld MT50, CLIPort, and CALVIN benchmarks by incorporating outcome predictions and lightweight comparators while keeping the core policy and observation encoders frozen.
arXiv AI
Oct 16
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.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12
BooST: Bridging Semantics and Motions for Efficient Skill Transfer
arXiv:2608. 10600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skill abstraction---the process of learning reusable and temporally extended behaviors---has emerged as a key paradigm for improving sample efficiency and generalization in robot learning.
arXiv AI
Jun 2
AttenA+: Rectifying Action Inequality in Robotic Foundation Models
arXiv:2605. 13548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
Prioritized Rollouts for Efficient World Model-based Vision-Language-Action Policy Optimization
Prioritized Rollouts for Efficient World Model-based Vision-Language-Action Policy Optimization introduces U‑GROW, a lightweight sampling layer that directs more model rollouts toward states with high policy uncertainty, identified as decision‑sensitive stages where small action differences can alter task outcomes. By modifying only the branched‑start distribution, U‑GROW can be integrated into existing model‑based reinforcement learning pipelines without changing the policy optimization objective. Experiments on simulated and real‑world manipulation tasks demonstrate that U‑GROW improves the efficiency and effectiveness of policy optimization for Vision‑Language‑Action models.