arXiv Machine Learning By Iok Tong Lei, Ying Jie Yap, Wei Huang, Qingchen Xie, Qianzhi Li, Yujie Zhang, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng

Teaching Tiny VLA Models Where to Look and How to Move

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2607. 04171v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tiny Vision-Language-Action models are appealing for real-time robotic control, but reducing model scale often weakens two capabilities essential for manipulation: task-conditioned spatial grounding and coherent action generation.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

XS-VLA: Coupling Coarse-grained Spatial Distillation with Latent Flow Matching for Lightweight Robotic Control

arXiv:2607. 04171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong multimodal understanding and spatial grounding, but their computational cost limits real-time robotic control.

By Lei Iok Tong, Qingchen Xie, Wei Huang, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Qianzhi Li, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

XS-VLA: Teaching Tiny Vision-Language-Action Models with Spatial Supervision and Demonstration Conditioning

arXiv:2607.04171v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How can richer training supervision improve robot control while keeping the deployed policy compact? We present XS-VLA, a staged training fra...

By Iok Tong Lei, Ying Jie Yap, Wei Huang, Qingchen Xie, Qianzhi Li, Yujie Zhang, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng
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
arXiv AI
Jun 9

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 08530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments.

By Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen, Shuai Dong, Jiajun Deng, Xin Zhang, Yuxuan Gao, Jiajia Wu, Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang, Xingyi Zhang, Jia Pan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

RotVLA: Rotational Latent Action for Vision-Language-Action Model

RotVLA introduces a Vision‑Language‑Action framework that replaces discrete latent action encoding with a continuous rotational latent action representation on the group SO(n). This design provides continuity, compositionality, and structured geometry that better capture real‑world action dynamics, and a triplet frame learning scheme enforces meaningful temporal dynamics while preventing degeneration. Trained with 1.7 B parameters on large cross‑embodiment datasets, RotVLA achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin2.0 benchmarks and shows strong real‑world manipulation results.

By Qiwei Li, Xicheng Gong, Xinghang Li, Peiyan Li, Quanyun Zhou, Hangjun Ye, Jiahuan Zhou, Yadong Mu
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