arXiv AI

Guided Action Flow: Value-Guided Sampling for Frozen Vision-Language-Action Policies

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.

By Yifei Sheng, Haoxiang Ren, Zhilong Zhang, Haonan Wang, Runjie Xu, Yihao Sun, Nan Tang, Zhichao Wu, Lei Yuan, Haoxin Lin, Yang Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605. 22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation.

By Weilong Guo, Yuchen Wang, Renping Zhou, Yunfeng Zhang, Rui Fang, Yuyang Pang, Wenda Xu, Gao Huang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policies

arXiv:2605. 03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning.

By Sarvesh Patil, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Manan Agarwal, Shashwat Saxena, Jesse Zhang, Giri Anantharaman, Cleah Winston, Chaoyi Pan, Douglas Chen, Nai-Chieh Huang, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, Sergey Levine, Abhishek Gupta, Hongkai Dai, Paarth Shah, Max Simchowitz
arXiv AI
Aug 19

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.

By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

Native Action-Prior Learning from Videos for World Action Models

The paper introduces NAVA-WAM, a method that learns action priors directly from observation-only videos to pretrain action policies for robots. It uses a two-stage training process: first, it pretrains on videos with future‑video flow‑matching supervision to learn action‑relevant priors, and second, it fine‑tunes with action‑labeled demonstrations for robot control. Experiments show that NAVA‑WAM outperforms previous methods in both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution scenarios, achieving strong action‑label efficiency and real‑robot generalization.

By Zhaochong An, Fei Zhang, Menglin Jia, Duncan Frost, Zijian Zhou, Yikai Wang, Xudong Wang, Aditya Patel, Belinda Zeng, Tao Xiang, Serge Belongie, Amir Bar, Sen He