arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
arXiv AI
Oct 26

SEVI: Safe Evidential Real-World Reinforcement Learning

SEVI (Safe Evidential Real-World Reinforcement Learning) is a framework that adds a safety intervention layer to real‑world policy learning. It uses an Evidential Safety Critic to estimate both future constraint‑violation risk and epistemic uncertainty in a single forward pass, and overrides unsafe or poorly supported actions with an offline‑trained recovery policy. Experiments on simulated manipulation tasks and a real‑world USB insertion task show that SEVI improves trajectory‑level safety prediction, task success, and reduces unsafe events by 13.4–57.1% compared to other safe RL baselines.

By Shaekh Mohammad Shithil, Lantao Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

CarryOn: A Dual-Loop Harness for Personalized and Reliable Robot Assistance

CarryOn is a dual-loop system that enhances frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies for robotic assistance by adding personalization and reliable execution. The planning loop maintains persistent user and scene context to ground subtask decomposition in user preferences, while the execution loop supervises policy rollouts to prevent hazardous contact and recover from failures using reusable control skills. Experiments on a real robot and in simulation show that CarryOn reduces safety violations from 52.6% to 6.1% and increases recovery success from 13% to 80%.

By Zixuan Wang, Yuqi Liu, Yuxin Chen, Sengqiao Yang, Jinhui Ye, Pengguang Chen, Changsheng Lu, Shu Liu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.

By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang