arXiv AI

VLA-Retain: Benchmarking Cross-Dimension Effects of Vision Tuning in VLAs

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 Computer Vision
Sep 3

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.

By Caio Azevedo, Stefano Sabatini, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Cross-Domain Tracker Adaptation Without Target-Domain Labels via Vision-Language Agents

The paper introduces a Vision‑Language Model (VLM) that acts as a diagnostic agent to adapt a detect‑to‑track system to new domains without target‑domain labels. By inspecting rendered tracking outputs, the VLM identifies failure modes and iteratively recommends parameter updates, recovering a significant portion of performance lost when transferring hyperparameters from a source domain. Experiments on MOT17→MOT20 show the VLM tuner restores 67.8% of the lost headroom, while Bayesian optimization with proxy objectives performs poorly under large domain shifts.

By Daniel Davila, Ravikumar Balakrishnan, Mike Cochran
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.

By Yiyang Du, Zhanqiu Guo, Haochen Zhang, Annabella Macaluso, Xin Ye, Liu Ren, Yonatan Bisk, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv AI
Jul 21

RobustVLA: On Robustness of Vision-Language-Action Model against Multi-Modal Perturbations

arXiv:2510. 00037v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Vision-Language-Actionf(VLA) models, robustness to real-world perturbations is critical for deployment.

By Jianing Guo, Zhenhong Wu, Chang Tu, Yiyao Ma, Xiangqi Kong, Zhiqian Liu, Jiaming Ji, Shuning Zhang, Yuanpei Chen, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yaodong Yang, Xianglong Liu, Huijie Zhao, Weifeng Lv, Simin Li
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

When Plans Change, Remember: Replanning-Guided Visual Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces RePlanMem-VLA, a selective visual memory system for Vision‑Language‑Action models that uses a policy’s own plan revisions as an online memory‑write signal. By detecting unusually large disagreements between temporally aligned action predictions, the method identifies task‑relevant events and updates a bounded visual memory while suppressing redundant frames. Experiments on MIKASA‑Robo‑VLA tasks and real‑robot replay data show that RePlanMem‑VLA retains essential observations in every episode and achieves high ROC‑AUC scores for event detection.

By Victoria Smelova, Daniil Kazachkov, Georgiy Kazantsev, Iuliia Tsvetkova, Egor Cherepanov, Nikita Kachaev, Artem Latyshev, Aleksandr I. Panov, Alexey K. Kovalev
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Your Model Already Knows Don't Teach It, Learn to Ask It: Soft Prompting for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

The paper explores soft prompting for few‑shot object detection with vision‑language models, showing that optimizing a small number of continuous prompt tokens—especially when placed at the cross‑modal boundary and initialized from an empty space token—can match LoRA performance while training far fewer parameters. Soft prompting also avoids catastrophic forgetting, transfers to newer models, and can be verbalized into readable prompts. The study extends these findings to manipulation tasks, indicating that VLMs already contain much of the necessary knowledge for specialized domains, and the main challenge is learning how to ask for it.

By Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Siyi Li, Hewei Wang, Cesar Daniel Hernandez, Wei Zhao, Wolfgang M. Pauli, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan
arXiv AI
Jun 29

Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?

arXiv:2606. 27755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-driven robotic manipulation, but they inherit oversized language backbones from pretrained VLMs whose capacity far exceeds what is needed for short robotic instructions.

By Guoheng Sun, Kaixi Feng, Shwai He, Xiaochuan Gong, Yexiao He, Ziyao Wang, Zheyu Shen, Wanghao Ye, Ramana Rao Kompella, Gaowen Liu, Ang Li
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 AI
Jul 13

CLAP: Direct VLM-to-VLA Adaptation via Language-Action Grounding

arXiv:2607. 08974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) inherit semantic capabilities from pretrained VLMs, yet large-scale post-training on robot data and architectural modifications can reshape the backbone so extensively that it becomes difficult to isolate what the VLM contributes to control.

By Yuri Ishitoya, Jeremy Siburian, Masashi Hamaya, Kuniaki Saito, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Mai Nishimura