arXiv AI

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
Jun 16

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

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.

By Jeongeun Park, Juhan Park, Taekyung Kim, Sungjoon Choi, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
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
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 AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Simple-to-Complex Structured Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.

arXiv AI
Jun 17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605. 31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments.

By Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu, Tianjian Wang, Youzhang He, Zitai Huang, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Hanyang Wang, Tianjiao Zhang, Munan Yin, Weihao Ding, Yi Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 24

TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics

arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.

By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna