The paper investigates how visuomotor imitation policies fail when visually similar distractors are introduced, framing the issue as conditional visual grounding where the target changes with manipulation phase and task state. Using Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), the authors systematically vary color and shape similarity of distractors, pinpointing failures to picking and placement stages. They then test distractor augmentation, phase‑dependent attention regularization, and appearance‑based visual prompting, which together significantly improve robustness in simulation and on a physical UR3e robot, and demonstrate similar improvements on a pretrained vision‑language‑action policy for instrument handling.
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.
arXiv:2608. 07065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-chunking visuomotor policies learn from demonstrations and improve temporal consistency by predicting short action sequences rather than single-step commands.
arXiv:2606. 12109v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide useful semantic and spatial priors, yet their parallel-gripper action interfaces do not specify how those priors should be realized by a dexterous hand.
arXiv:2606. 15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute.
The paper proposes a neuro‑symbolic framework that augments vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with explicit task graphs and multimodal procedural memory to handle long‑horizon manipulation tasks. Task graphs encode action dependencies, valid transitions, and branch conditions, while memory tracks the active step, completed actions, textual context, and relevant visual evidence. Human demonstrations provide spatial and temporal guidance via gaze or saliency cues, which are annotated in robot‑view teleoperation videos and used to fine‑tune VLA models. The approach is evaluated on workspace clearing and surgical‑instrument handling tasks, measuring object and destination selection, subtask completion, task progress, step‑order consistency, overall success, and procedural or execution mistakes.
arXiv:2512. 20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects.
arXiv:2607. 16506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies offer strong general-purpose manipulation priors, but often fail on tight-tolerance, contact-rich assembly due to long-horizon credit assignment and subtask coupling: a state that is geometrically successful for the current skill can be brittle for downstream skills.
arXiv:2509.18778v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual imitation learning frameworks allow robots to learn manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. While existing approaches mainly f...
arXiv:2603. 06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to perform manipulation tasks directly from natural language instructions and are increasingly viewed as a foundation for generalist robotic policies.
arXiv:2609.15005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies perform robot manipulation tasks using multimodal inputs such as visual observations, proprioceptive states, an...
AntiGrounding is a visual action-selection framework that turns short robot trajectories into both executable motion plans and rendered prompts for vision‑language model evaluation. After filtering for feasibility, each trajectory is scored on safety, task alignment, efficiency, and physical plausibility using structured multi‑view visual question answering, and the best trajectories are refined and validated by a digital twin before real‑world execution. In eight real‑world manipulation tasks, the system achieved a 71.25% success rate with a single GPT‑6 Astra evaluator, outperforming baseline methods.
arXiv:2603. 22876v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning a generalist control policy for robotic manipulation typically relies on large-scale datasets.