https://hu-zlatan.github.io/embodied-ai-radar/topics/vla.xml 2026-10-29T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37666 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made substantial progress in robotic manipulation, but their generalization remains constrained by the diversity and coverage of action-labeled robot demonstrations. Human videos provide much broader behavioral and environmental experience, while learning from them faces a fundamental trade-off between scalable data and explicit action grounding. We introduce ThinkWorld, a VLA learning framework that grounds action reasoning in world dynamics and strengthens it through reinforcement learning with world imagination. ThinkWorld represents each action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37509 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

As egocentric video becomes increasingly available for embodied learning, an important research question is how to turn this low-cost, scalable source of data into robot manipulation capabilities. Egocentric videos naturally provide rich context for high-level task understanding, while real-robot demonstrations with wrist observations and action annotations provide supervision for fine-grained action alignment. We present Ego-CEVR, a data-native framework for hierarchical visual representation learning that assigns distinct learning objectives to global and interaction representations. The …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37381 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but their understanding of physical dynamics remains limited. Video world models can capture scene dynamics, yet generating future videos introduces high latency into the control loop. We introduce PDRVLA, whose lightweight Physical Dynamics Module extracts physical tokens from vision--language features to condition action generation without online video generation. The module learns through direct prediction of future RGB, depth, and optical-flow features, with auxiliary …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37378 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate high-level reasoning with low-level action execution for end-to-end robotic control. However, most VLA models target static manipulation in unconstrained environments, overlooking spatial constraints and dynamic obstacles. Fine-tuning VLAs on obstacle-avoidance data is a straightforward solution, but collecting such data is costly, especially for dynamic scenarios, and may degrade their original task capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose VLA-Stem, a lightweight, reinforcement-learning-based safety mechanism for VLA systems. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37330 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a promising paradigm for scalable robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on success-only behavioral cloning leaves them brittle; lacking corrective training signals, minor execution errors rapidly compound into unrecoverable, out-of-distribution failures. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Failure-Informed Learning (AFIL), an end-to-end framework that leverages failure trajectories as adaptive negative guidance for diffusion- and flow-based VLA policies. AFIL uses a pretrained VLA to generate failure rollouts online, avoiding the need …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37219 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

The vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) communities debate whether control policies should inherit pretrained knowledge from vision-language models or from visual generators. The debate, however, bundles three separable choices: backbone initialization, the objective applied to future observations, and whether the machinery for that future loss is kept at inference. A gap between a VLA and a WAM therefore cannot simply be attributed to any one of them. We show that decoupling these choices yields a common framework for both families, which we term Just Action Model …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37215 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies demonstrate remarkable semantic generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) visual shifts during execution. While existing test-time methods attempt to suppress spurious visual cues, they fundamentally overlook the rich, uncorrupted kinematic priors embedded in the policy's own training experience. We introduce Retrieve to Act (R2A), a test-time scaling framework that formulates OOD robustness purely as a geometric motion primitive retrieval problem. R2A bypasses fragile visual features by structuring successful training …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37170 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

We trained four widely used imitation-learning policies, ACT, Diffusion Policy, SmolVLA and $\pi_{0.5}$, on nested subsets of 12, 25, 50, 100 and 200 teleoperated demonstrations of one pick-and-place task with distractor objects, using one fixed training recipe per policy. Every trained model was then run on a physical SO-101 arm on a fixed set of object placements: 1,340 scored episodes in 126 blocks. ACT, trained from scratch, rose from 1 success in 40 episodes at 12 demonstrations to 37 in 40 at 100. $\pi_{0.5}$ with its action expert fine-tuned was the best policy when data was scarce (16 …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36791 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Learning controllable world dynamics from heterogeneous interaction videos is challenging because robot embodiments use incompatible action spaces, while human videos lack native control labels. We present RynnWorld-Latent, a cross-embodiment video world model that uses the 3D-grounded latent actions introduced by RynnLAM as a shared conditioning interface. This representation enables joint pretraining on human interaction videos, robot demonstrations, and simulation rollouts without requiring a common native action space. Built on a pretrained video transformer, RynnWorld-Latent combines …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36765 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

We fine-tuned a separate $\pi_{0.5}$ policy for each of the five tasks in the MetaFine Open Competition, with a task-specific training mixture and number of actions executed per prediction. Training started from the official demonstrations and expert procedures. Local evaluation exposed recurring grasping, pushing, and insertion failures. We addressed them by revising the demonstrated motions and by adding expert continuations from states the policy reached, while keeping nominal demonstrations in training. Checkpoints were compared on every instruction, so that a gain on one instruction …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36535 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Differences in musculoskeletal morphology challenge policy reuse across individual models. Here we present MyoAcross, a framework that combines individual musculoskeletal model construction, morphology-conditioned policy learning and virtual model augmentation to enable muscle-driven reference-motion tracking without individual fine-tuning. Across 31 held-out individual models, MyoAcross achieves 99.24% completion and reduces tracking error by 22.60% relative to an unconditioned multilayer perceptron. Policy reuse extends to models of 22 held-out individuals constructed from single-image …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36507 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Humanoid behavior foundation models (BFMs) provide reusable whole-body motion priors: given a kinematic reference, they generate coordinated joint commands for motion replay, teleoperation, and VLA control. However, trained primarily on flat-ground motion, BFMs lack an explicit mechanism to adapt foot placement, swing clearance, and contact timing to local terrain. Many terrain-aware BFM approaches address this limitation by retraining or fine-tuning the tracker together with perception, incurring substantial data and computation costs while coupling ordinary tracking to the perception …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36285 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Navigation vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly invoke costly semantic reasoning even when the next command remains unchanged. Command reuse can reduce computation but risks missing instruction-dependent turns or stops. We introduce ASPEN, an event-triggered scheduler based on command persistence prediction: estimating whether the frozen base policy would reissue its previous command. A lightweight multimodal predictor combines temporal observations, language instructions, execution history, and cached VLA confidence. At eligible command boundaries, sufficient predicted …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35832 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can control robots without robot-specific training, but how their capabilities compare and interact with post-trained vision-language-action (VLA) and world action model (WAM) policies across manipulation demands remains to be thoroughly evaluated. In this report, we evaluate GPT-6-Astra on EBench as the core of an agent that controls a robot through an agent harness under the same visual and proprioceptive observation protocol as post-trained policies. We study two agent configurations: direct control, in which the agent generates waypoint …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35626 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Efficient robotic data collection remains a major bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) policy learning, especially for tasks requiring accurate end-effector positioning and camera-action alignment. This challenge is particularly severe in electronic-waste disassembly, where robots operate in cluttered assemblies of densely packed, visually similar components. Full digital-twin simulation is difficult because many parts are thin, reflective, or mechanically complex, making accurate object-level meshes and contact models difficult to obtain. In this work, we focus on pre-contact reaching …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35010 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can select among discrete candidates for pick-and-place manipulation or generate continuous action chunks for motion control. Improving both forms of decision making through a common mechanism while retaining the capabilities of a pretrained policy is an important adaptation problem. Inspired by Jev's structured, probabilistic decision interface, we propose JevVLA, a lightweight energy-based adaptation framework for VLA policies. JevVLA instantiates this inspiration by modeling the relative quality of action proposals: with the base policy frozen, it …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34837 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Humans exhibit biological sensitivity to safety-critical stimuli that can trigger defensive action. Across three models and two video benchmarks, we investigate whether similar responses emerge in vision-language-action models by examining their internal representations and action tendencies in response to visible hazards and harmful consequences. Our findings suggest that task execution may remain the default response even when danger is internally registered.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34717 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision--language--action (VLA) models increasingly run on edge devices aboard robots, where inference latency constrains closed-loop robot control. However, it remains unclear how to design VLA models, their inference software and edge hardware so that robots can run VLA inference in real time. Most VLA models report only task success, while prior studies cover limited action-generation strategies, divide inference into at most three stages, and lack comparisons of inference optimizations on the same models.benchmarking 18 open VLA models across released and alternative backends on NVIDIA …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34649 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34519 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly used for robot manipulation because they map camera images and a language instruction directly to actions. Robots that cannot be tethered to a workstation, such as mobile manipulators and humanoids, must run them on onboard embedded boards, where the prefill latency of the language backbone grows with the hundreds of visual tokens processed at every control step. To meet real-time limits, training-free accelerators recompute only a subset of the visual tokens and skip the rest, either by pruning them or by reusing their cached key-value …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34356 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Scaling vision-language-action (VLA) models is constrained by scarce action-labeled demonstrations and incompatible control spaces across robot embodiments. We present RynnVLA-Latent, a framework that turns heterogeneous interaction videos into scalable supervision for robot policy pretraining. At its core, RynnLAM learns continuous, 3D-grounded latent actions from visual transitions without requiring native robot controls. By combining residual future-feature prediction, camera-compensated 3D-flow supervision, and camera-motion decoupling, RynnLAM encourages representations that capture …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34251 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet their ability to execute long-horizon tasks remains limited by insufficient long- term memory modeling. Existing methods either rely on implicit temporal representations within policy networks, where historical information can be gradually diluted, or maintain explicit memory buffers that suffer from redundancy, noise accumulation, and inefficient retrieval. In this paper, we propose CogMemory, a novel variational cognitive memory framework that enables VLA systems to selectively preserve and reuse …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34186 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Extending Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) to humanoid robots requires coordinated whole-body control and diverse demonstrations that are costly to collect in real-world scenarios. Although egocentric human demonstrations provide a complementary source of task experience, differences in visual embodiment and missing robot proprioception complicate transfer to humanoid policies. To address these challenges, we introduce HuGe, a family of Humanoid Generalist VLAs pre-trained on over 2,000 hours of egocentric human and robot data. Specifically, HuGe employs three existing representative VLA …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34108 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map a language instruction and the current observation directly to actions, without checking whether the instruction has been completed. For long-horizon tasks, a single failed step therefore goes unnoticed and leaves the whole task unfinished. Such failed episodes, however, often end with the task partially complete. Moreover, the unfinished steps are reusable atomic skills that recur across demonstrations. A failed attempt can thus be recovered by composing with atomic skills. We propose RoboDuo, a closed-loop dual-system framework that uses code as the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34051 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Robot tasks require grounding spatial language in physical scenes, but task success alone cannot establish whether spatial instructions are followed. We present BEHAVIOR-Spatial, a benchmark built on BEHAVIOR-1K that measures spatial question answering, point-based target grounding, and robot action to examine how VLM spatial understanding relates to VLA behavior. It comprises 3,256 spatial questions across 49 activities, 1,240 grounding queries across 14 manipulation tasks, and action evaluations covering those 14 tasks and 10 navigation tasks. Our manipulation protocol evaluates held-out …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33866 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robots to follow instructions in typed text, limiting broader deployment in natural speech. The traditional solution by prepending a speech recognition before VLA to convert speech into texts would incur additional latency and propagate errors. To address this, we present Speech-$\pi_{0.5}$, which maps raw speech directly to motor commands without explicit textual transcriptions. Specifically, built on $\pi_{0.5}$, we use a cross-modal projection to convert voice frames directly into audio tokens with significant response latency reduction. To …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33794 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Deploying a language-guided navigation policy in a new building usually means watching it fail. Public-benchmark VLAs degrade scene by scene as layout, appearance, and language drift, and the standard fix of teleoperating fresh trajectories on site does not scale. We replace human demonstration with a single brief iPhone scan. Scan2Instruction compiles that scan into a complete training environment, automatically synthesizing executable navigation episodes with grounded instructions. PRPT-KS then adapts the policy through a closed-form Pareto utility read directly off the reconstructed scene, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33685 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are bottlenecked by the scarcity of robot data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer an abundant, diverse, and semantically-rich alternative that inherently captures manipulation intent. However, the embodiment gap makes it difficult to extract action-relevant representations from these videos. From the perspective of action execution, human hands and robots share analogous manipulation primitives---reaching, grasping, placing---yet exhibit distinct kinematics tied to their embodiments. This might motivate our key approach: egocentric video …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33658 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on dense, continuous-valued computation presents a fundamental challenge for energy-constrained deployment. Inspired by the sparse, event-driven signaling and temporal integration mechanisms of biological neurons, a promising alternative is to introduce spiking computation into VLA models. However, enabling such computation without restructuring pretrained policies or compromising closed-loop control remains an open challenge. To address this challenge, we introduce the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33650 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Online distillation of vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly relies on teacher action scores that an inference-only interface may not expose. Trajectory-only Adversarial Distillation (\gad{}) instead turns a fixed bank of teacher joint-position features into adaptive feedback: a discriminator compares feature marginals from teacher and student rollouts and supplies rewards for on-policy learning. The student interacts with the environment without online teacher queries or environment task rewards. On ManiSkill \texttt{PutOnPlateInScene25Main}, \gad{} improves OpenVLA-OFT (7B) from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33074 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robots to perform tasks specified through natural-language instructions, but their large weight footprint challenges deployment on memory-constrained onboard platforms. Ultra-low-bit quantization reduces this footprint, yet preserving task performance and controlling weight recovery costs remain challenging. We propose Action-Guided Quantization, which combines action sensitivity with a measured proxy for weight recovery cost to allocate matrix bitwidths under storage budgets. Per-channel calibration compensates for quantization error, while a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32941 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models perform well on robotic manipulation, yet remain brittle once their own actions carry them into states their training data barely covers. Recovering from such failures usually requires recovery demonstrations, policy retraining, or a separate model at inference time. We introduce Backtrack, a lightweight failure detection and recovery mechanism for frozen VLAs that needs none of these. A small failure prediction head, trained only on outcome-labeled rollouts of the frozen policy, reads the VLA's existing internal representations to estimate whether the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32888 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can adapt to local human intervention, while federated learning can combine distributed robot experience without pooling raw records. We examine their prospective intersection: sharing adaptations derived from diverse human corrections across tasks, environments, people, and robot embodiments. Corrections differ in modality, safety semantics(urgency, behavioral scope, etc.), and privacy sensitivity. A shared update that improves mean task success may suppress a rare safety intervention or produce an unsafe response on another robot. We argue for three …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32431 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

A failed vision-language-action (VLA) rollout does not imply that every action contributed to failure. Yet in group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), a single trajectory-level advantage is assigned to all actions in a rollout. Potentially useful recovery attempts can thus be penalized alongside the errors they aim to correct. Ideal stopping conditions for failure feedback are characterized using success-probability and policy-score martingales. At these stops, the removed gradient contribution has zero conditional expectation given the retained information. Truncation therefore preserves …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32312 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Generalist robot manipulation requires a single vision-language-action (VLA) policy to execute diverse skills across scenes and instructions. However, current multi-skill VLA policies often leave two aspects of an instruction insufficiently modeled: which primitive skill to execute and where/how to contact and move objects. We propose MAST-VLA (Multi-skill Adaptation with Skill-conditioned experts and Trajectory-affordance priors), a dual-conditioning framework for robot manipulation. MAST-VLA introduces skill-conditioned LoRA Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) adapters in the LLM backbone, where …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32271 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are typically pretrained on broad, diverse datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on a comparatively small dataset tailored to a specific target robot. Such adaptation recipe is now widely established, achieving its most mature results on fixed-base arms due to their static base dynamics and consistent reference frame. Mounting the same arm on a quadruped extends the workspace to the entire floor, but fundamentally changes the embodiment: rather than controlling the arm in isolation, the policy must jointly coordinate base navigation, body posture, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32208 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as powerful general-purpose robot policies, but their successes and failures remain difficult to diagnose and understand. In this work, we show that sparse autoencoder (SAE) representations of OpenVLA activations contain outcome-predictive information and can be used to predict task failure before the robot reaches an unrecoverable state. Moreover, to provide insights into what common behaviors may contribute to these outcomes, we identify individual SAE features whose strong activations are associated with specific stages of success or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32102 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generate expressive continuous trajectories for robotic manipulation, yet balancing real-time responsiveness with execution stability remains a persistent challenge. Standard deployment workflows typically treat numerical solver depth and execution horizon as decoupled choices. The horizon amortizes inference latency, while solver depth is kept high to preserve integration fidelity. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental compute-execution coupling in flow-matching VLAs governed by a systematic sign reversal. While coarse numerical integration …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32094 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Long-horizon robot tasks require retaining and using past information. We integrate Test-Time Training (TTT), which stores context in fast weights, into InternVLA-A1 and Pi0.5 to study action generation conditioned on human demonstrations through training on paired demonstrations and robot trajectories. We implement memory transfer between the two phases and truncated backpropagation, and examine training objectives, gradient coverage, and contrastive regularization across video, short-video, and single-frame cue tasks. In our experiments, adding TTT and training on paired data at the current …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31859 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

When a vision-language-action (VLA) model is fine-tuned with its trainable weights in bfloat16 (bf16) and no fp32 master copy, AdamW writes each update straight into bf16, silently rounding away any update smaller than 1/512 of a weight. In 9 of 12 open VLA codebases a default or documented recipe trains this way, 4 on full weight matrices, including LeRobot's SmolVLA default and its $\pi_0$/$\pi_{0.5}$ guides. In our LIBERO runs without the copy, a probe every 100 steps finds at least 79% of updates to bf16 weights erased. On the Hugging Face Hub, 99% of sampled full-weight SmolVLA …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31613 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can perform diverse manipulation tasks directly from visual observations and natural language instructions, but they remain prone to mistakes and unpredictable failures. Deploying these policies without continuous human supervision will require robust runtime monitors that detect when the policy has gone off-course. Existing monitors use external foundation models, such as vision-language models (VLMs) to supervise the policy, introducing significant complexity and computational cost for monitoring at runtime. In this work, we investigate an alternate …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31569 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Recognizing task completion and failure enables robots to stop upon success and initiate recovery or replanning after failure. Existing methods augment Vision Language Action (VLA) policies with task status signal prediction to support these execution decisions. However, learning and integrating these signals can require fine-grained supervision, external monitoring models, or complex architectural designs. Moreover, the potential of task status signals to directly guide action generation remains underexplored. We present Echo, a framework that combines task status signal learning without …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31427 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Agentic robot systems combine language-model reasoning with robot policies to monitor execution and recover from failures. However, reviewing every action chunk incurs substantial overhead, even in familiar situations. We introduce FastHarness, an experience-driven execution harness that adaptively schedules GPT-6 Astra supervision of a {\pi}0.5 policy. A fast path uses stage memory and reviewed outcomes to reduce review frequency as experience accumulates, while a complementary recovery path focuses supervision on correcting errors. Once recovery is verified, routine execution resumes, with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31423 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have become an important paradigm for robotic manipulation by unifying visual perception, language understanding, and action generation. Since reliable manipulation requires sufficient observation of objects, end-effectors, and their spatial relationships, multi-view inputs are widely used to provide complementary spatial information. However, our experiments show that existing VLA models do not fully exploit such multi-view complementarity. The policy tends to persistently rely on the wrist view, lacking the ability to dynamically adjust global-local view …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31166 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation in dynamic scenes is non-Markovian: cues vanish as objects change or are hidden, or leave the view as the robot turns and walks, yet whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies see only the present. We present WholeBodyMem, an object-guided perceptual memory that keeps the pre-history of object events seen before the robot acts on its goal. SAM3 tracks the task objects, and their events causally select key frames within an adaptive budget, which the action expert reads by cross-attention together with object tokens encoding appearance, geometry and time. We …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31162 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Building virtual embodied agents that operate in open-ended games like human players is a long-standing goal requiring both long-horizon autonomy and reliable native-interface control. As a procedurally generated open world, Minecraft provides a natural testbed for studying the integration of these capabilities. Existing agents typically provide either native visuomotor control without long-horizon autonomy or high-level planning executed through environment APIs or predefined skills. To bridge this gap, we propose HiSTEVE, a hierarchical VLA agent with a capability-aware agent harness. At …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30953 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Driving vision-language-action (VLA) models bring an appealing form of explainability to a safety-critical domain, since a system that can state the reasons for its maneuvers offers the transparency that deployment and public trust in autonomous driving demand. These models read the world into language before they act on it, describing the scene and reasoning over it in text that ranges from chain-of-thought to multi-stage question answering on the way to a trajectory. That framing quietly assumes two separable properties, namely that the trajectory follows the generated reasoning and that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30735 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Flow matching is now the dominant approach for vision-language action (VLA) robot policies, thanks to its expressiveness and simple training objective. However, inference for standard flow matching requires iteratively solving an ODE, limiting the control frequency at deployment. While several works have proposed novel methods to allow for single-shot action generation, we ask whether such additional objectives are actually necessary. We find that across six flow matching VLAs, one-step action generation largely matches multi-step sampling at scale: multi-step integration confers little to no …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30732 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising results in multi-task robotic manipulation by leveraging visual and language understanding for action generation. However, existing lightweight VLA models employ a single dense action expert to handle all tasks, which limits their multi-task capability under constrained computational budgets. To address this issue, we propose SmolVLA-MoE, a novel framework that introduces sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) into the FFN layers of the action expert in VLA models. SmolVLA-MoE replaces dense FFN layers with multiple parallel expert FFNs and a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30671 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Visual Language Action (VLA) models are designed to be generalist robot models that can be implemented across embodiments, tasks and environments. However, their ability to collaborate with other robots and humans remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a framework to automate the generation of multi-robot collaborative data for decentralized VLA training without requiring human teleoperation. Our framework first utilizes a decentralized collaborative planning approach to generate multi-robot collaborative robot plans in the form of an executable function. We then utilize the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30097 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, but imitation learning (IL) alone often struggles to master complex long-horizon skills. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an effective avenue for further improving VLA policies. However, existing VLA-RL methods typically suffer from delayed and biased credit assignment due to trajectory-level sparse rewards, while imbalanced subtask mastery creates bottlenecks that limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicRL, an RL post-training framework that leverages atomic task structures for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30044 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29866 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Geometric structure is essential for robotic manipulation and understanding the 3D world. Most VLA models rely on 2D representations of current observations, while geometry-aware approaches often require additional 3D information. However, geometry inferred independently from individual observations is often discarded rather than accumulated into a persistent task representation. Our key insight is that action generation needs a compact, task-relevant geometric abstraction that can be continuously updated, rather than a complete, renderable 3D reconstruction at every step. We introduce …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29730 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies need to recognize gaps in their training knowledge to request useful demonstrations or assistance in new situations, especially when failures are costly. Disagreement within an ensemble of independently trained policies can guide these decisions, but requires training and running multiple policies. We propose post-hoc kernel-variance heads that estimate epistemic uncertainty from the embeddings of a single policy. Each head computes the conditional variance of a Gaussian process conditioned on embeddings from the training demonstrations. Fitting requires …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29692 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

During steady pouring, images and robot pose may remain nearly unchanged while transferred mass accumulates, making the return decision ambiguous for a whole-task vision-language-action (VLA) policy. We present FlowVLA, which separates motor generation from physical-completion estimation. A shared $\pi_{0.5}$ action expert learns approach, pour, and return with boundary-aware supervision. A target-independent estimator fuses visual, joint, wrist-wrench, and recurrent force-belief histories to maintain an estimate of transferred mass. The controller initiates return when this estimate plus …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29646 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Choosing among robot demonstration corpora is a ranking problem: an upstream diagnostic must preserve which candidates produce better downstream policies, not merely correlate with average performance. We study paired instruction dependence, the rate at which a demonstrator changes its first decision when only the goal changes. Across 136 independently seeded quadruped-navigation corpora, predictions developed on 56 corpora are evaluated prospectively on 80 held-out corpora. The audit is reliable and associated with downstream paired correctness, and lowers mean absolute prediction error when …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29560 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong performance across embodied manipulation tasks by unifying visual understanding, language conditioning, and action generation. However, long-horizon tasks can involve non-Markovian dependencies: successful decisions may require retaining task progress and past interaction outcomes, while partial observability and execution errors compound over time. Existing work has begun to address these challenges by augmenting foundation-model policies with memory and by introducing hierarchical architectures that separate high-level planning from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29203 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) navigation models translate visual observations and instructions into actions. Navigation success assesses whether an agent reaches the goal. However, reaching the goal successfully does not establish whether the model genuinely follows the instructions or relies on visual cues or navigation history. We introduce NavBind to diagnose instruction-action binding: whether changing the instruction influences the probabilistic distribution of the actions, with the navigation context fixed. We construct 3,252 route-fork contexts by recombining route-aligned instruction …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29161 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Human-in-the-loop (HIL) post-training improves vision-language-action (VLA) policies through expert corrections, but costly human supervision and repeated real-robot evaluation limit algorithm exploration and development. We introduce SimPT (Simulation-based Post-Training), a simulation framework that automates intervention-based VLA post-training by integrating policy rollouts, corrective data collection, policy training, and standalone evaluation. To automatically determine intervention timing and recovery strategies, we develop an Agent-Compiled Progress Graph that tracks task progress …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28589 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Agentic robotics systems combine planners with robot harnesses to perform complex manipulation tasks. Recent work improves these systems through better harnesses and external memory, but relies on powerful closed-source models as planners and does not improve the planners' own capabilities. In contrast, coding agents have improved substantially by post-training the model itself. We therefore investigate whether post-training can also improve robot planners. However, applying it across robot harnesses requires accommodating different execution mechanisms, including VLA skill invocation and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28184 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Reasoning-augmented vision-language-action (VLA) driving models can perceive and reason about safety-critical hazards yet fail to translate that evidence into safe actions. We characterize this failure as a perception-action binding gap: hazard information is available inside the model but exerts insufficient control over trajectory generation. Using matched simulated counterfactuals and logged driving replay, we show that in-path hazards are actually encoded in the visual representation, but longitudinal plans are dominated by ego-speed history and respond only weakly to hazard proximity or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28166 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies increasingly reason before acting, but existing reasoning models compress this intermediate decision into a single representation. When several plans are valid, this commitment hides alternatives that could otherwise be selected or revised. We introduce the Generative Plan Latent (GPL), which represents the reasoning state as a low-dimensional conditional distribution over plans, such as which object, grasp, or route to use. This makes the reasoning state addressable: without retraining the VLA, plans can be sampled (coverage), selected on request …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28109 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance on standard robotic manipulation benchmarks. However, their reliability can degrade substantially when task conditions deviate from the nominal setting. Perturbations in object positions and task instructions may lead to complete task failure. Existing VLA policies generally lack an explicit runtime mechanism for distinguishing these failure modes and selecting an appropriate recovery strategy. To systematically mitigate this issue, we propose FIT-MAC, a failure-aware, closed-loop multi-agent control framework for improving …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28019 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies are commonly deployed with asynchronous inference in real-world settings, where the next action chunk is generated while the robot is still executing the previous one. By the time the new chunk is committed, the robot and scene have changed, so the chunk is conditioned on a stale observation and task success drops sharply as this inference delay grows. Generating multiple candidate chunks could let newer observations inform the final choice, but existing multi-candidate methods either rank candidates with the stale inference-start observation or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27861 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) robustness is commonly summarized by aggregate task success, which obscures how individual executions change under distribution shifts and where failures emerge in long-horizon tasks. We introduce \textbf{RoboCasa-Shift}, a diagnostic robustness benchmark built on RoboCasa365 that combines controlled single-factor shifts, matched clean-perturbed rollouts in which each pair shares the same underlying settings and differs only in the target shift, and simulator-grounded stage-aware diagnostics. We evaluate GR00T N1.5 on four long-horizon tasks that pass a predefined …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27794 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Action-free videos are an appealing substitute for costly teleoperated data. Latent action models (LAMs) turn videos into a supervision signal by inferring abstract actions between frames. Existing LAMs observe a single camera view, which resolves 6D robot actions only ambiguously missing out-of-plane movements and potential occlusions. We propose a LAM that ingests synchronized multi-camera views using cross-attention to resolve depth and occlusions before compressing them into latent actions. The latent actions are fed into a policy in which a latent expert and an action expert are coupled …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27698 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models transfer knowledge from large-scale pretraining into robot control, but their manipulation performance remains sensitive to changes in observation conditions, which recent work addresses by fine-tuning the visual module on target-domain data. However, it remains unclear how such adaptation affects robustness beyond the target condition, as existing robustness benchmarks only evaluate models without fine-tuning and adaptation studies only report the target gain. Measuring this cross-dimension effect requires separating target gains from off-target changes, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27657 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but effective manipulation also requires anticipating how the environment will change. Existing world-action models explore future image prediction and latent dynamics modeling. However, generating complete future images can be computationally expensive, while highly compressed latent representations may obscure local changes. To address these challenges, we propose PLaCA, a world-to-action framework built around future latent change. PLaCA directly predicts spatially structured …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27277 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are sensitive to visual corruptions, but knowing that a corruption is typically harmful does not establish whether removing it would benefit the current episode. Furthermore, when several corruptions co-occur, deciding what to correct requires understanding which ones contribute to failure risk and how much their removal would help. We define this problem as failure attribution. Detecting corruption presence alone cannot answer this question, as corruptions can be present but relatively harmless, while directly measuring removal benefits requires costly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26962 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Differences in hand geometry, joint parameterization, and kinematic topology pose challenges for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp generation. However, spatial relations among links alone are insufficient to fully capture the hand's kinematic topology. We propose DexGraspFlow, a conditional link-level $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ flow-matching framework integrating geometric relations and kinematic topology. The framework encodes local object geometry, link geometry, and current poses. A dual-stream DiT models link--link coordination and link--object interaction, while attention biases derived from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26717 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Robotic manipulation in agricultural environments remains challenging due to variations in plant geometry, occlusion, and camera viewpoints. Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) and generalist robot policies offer a promising approach to addressing these challenges by learning manipulation behaviors from multimodal observations and language instructions. However, adapting these policies to agricultural tasks requires domain-specific demonstrations, which are costly and time-consuming to collect on physical robots. In this work, we develop a simulation-to-real robot-learning framework for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26584 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet adapting generalist vision-language-action (VLA) policies to real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging. Unlike fixed-base or wheeled manipulators, humanoids must coordinate locomotion, posture, gaze, and dual-arm manipulation over a high-dimensional whole-body action space, where inaccurate base or waist motions can easily induce unstable and aggressive upper-body compensation. We propose HAF-VLA, a hierarchical action-flow framework for humanoid VLA control. Built upon a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26487 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

The limited onboard computing resources of robots make the inference demands of vision-language-action (VLA) models costly to accommodate. Reducing these demands through aggressive compression, however, can degrade manipulation performance beyond what supervised fine-tuning alone recovers. We present SPAR (Structural Pruning and Action Recovery), which simultaneously prunes the hidden and feed-forward intermediate dimensions of the large language model (LLM) backbone through pruning-aware tuning, then applies reinforcement learning (RL) to recover policy performance. Applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26287 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Modern robotic photography requires understanding photographic intent, planning camera motions, and producing aesthetically pleasing images in complex environments. We present RoboPhoto-VLA, a unified Vision-Language-Action framework that jointly models perception, reasoning, and camera control for autonomous robotic photography. RoboPhoto-VLA incorporates PhotoCoT for structured action planning and Aesthetic Direct Preference Optimization (ADPO) to align camera behaviors with human aesthetic preferences. To facilitate training and evaluation, we construct OpenPhotography, a robotic …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25981 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Integrating force awareness into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models involves not merely encoding wrench measurements as an additional modality, but determining when and how strongly physical interaction should influence robot action generation. Existing VLAs that use force typically inject it through a fixed pathway, without explicitly determining when it is relevant to the current action. This calls for an intermediate force relevance mechanism inside the VLA, in which visual-language context estimates the relevance of physical feedback to the current task before force enters the action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25961 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Fast and reliable manipulation is crucial for practical robot deployment. Although Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown remarkable progress as generalist robot policies, their execution often remains temporally inefficient. A key source of this inefficiency is that policies learn fine-grained temporal patterns from teleoperated demonstrations, requiring many low-level action steps. Temporal action quantization offers a simple way to accelerate execution by aggregating consecutive low-level actions into temporally coarser actions. However, applying action quantization …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25927 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25874 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Robotic manipulation is not merely observation-to-action generation, but the realization of task-specified state changes in the physical world. Existing vision-language-action (VLA) methods directly learn observation-to-action mappings, imposing a substantial learning burden due to the gap between semantic understanding and action execution. Although world-action models (WAMs) improve control through future prediction, modeling complete future states wastes capacity on static appearance and action-irrelevant changes. We propose Vision-Language-Delta-Action (VLDA), a paradigm that reformulates …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25734 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Autonomous driving fundamentally demands dense understanding of visual, semantic, and geometric information, yet existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with sparse supervision such as language instructions or trajectory signals. This direct mapping from dense visual observations to sparse representations forces the model to compress or even discard critical scene information essential for safe driving. We argue that this limitation does not stem from insufficient model capacity, but from the lack of explicit mechanisms that encourage the formation of dense world …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25534 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Underwater robots support a growing range of work, from inspecting offshore structures and pipelines to surveying reefs and accompanying divers. Most of these tasks, however, are still flown by hand by a pilot, which raises the question of whether they can be carried out autonomously instead. On land, vision-language-action (VLA) models already let robots carry out tasks autonomously from language instructions, which makes them a natural candidate for taking the pilot's place. Underwater, however, there is little data to train such models. We take inspiration from how these tasks are flown …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25426 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

The assessment of surgical skills in robotic surgery training has traditionally relied on subjective evaluations by human experts, creating bottlenecks in surgical education and limiting scalability. We present a novel foundation model that automatically analyzes robotic surgical videos to provide comprehensive skill assessment and gesture understanding. Combining a visual encoder with a transformer architecture, the model performs three key tasks simultaneously: 1) surgical task classification (knot tying, needle passing, suturing), 2) skill level assessment on a standardized scale, and 3) …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25410 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes remains a central challenge in robotic manipulation, as it requires high-dimensional hand coordination under complex object-environment constraints. To address this problem, we introduce one of the largest simulation benchmarks to date, comprising around 0.5B grasp annotations across eight dexterous hands and approximately 50K objects. Furthermore, we propose T(R,O) Grasp++, a scalable diffusion-based framework for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp synthesis in cluttered environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25407 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Onboard inference latency creates a mismatch between the trajectories predicted by vision-language-action (VLA) policies and the ongoing motion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We present AeroDASH, an asynchronous VLA framework for continuous language-conditioned flight. A B-spline policy is initialized through supervised fine-tuning on expert demonstrations, providing continuous trajectory references in position and yaw. During execution, trajectory fusion removes the expired prediction prefix and connects the remaining segment to the active reference with derivative continuity while …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25376 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Large-scale action pretraining equips Embodied Foundation Models (EFMs) with strong manipulation capabilities, with particular strengths in generalization and closed-loop robustness, but reproducing such pretraining requires substantial robot data and computation. To transfer these capabilities from pretrained EFMs to policies without action pretraining, we introduce TILDE (Teacher-In-the-Loop Distillation from EFMs), which synergizes on-policy distillation at student-induced states with learning from teacher-executed recovery trajectories. We further propose AutoDAgger, an autonomous data …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25043 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) models generate an action chunk by iteratively denoising Gaussian noise, but typically execute only a short prefix before replanning with updated observations. Under this receding-horizon paradigm, the unexecuted remainder---the action tail---is discarded, and the next chunk is regenerated from fresh noise. We show that this discarded tail retains transferable denoising progress: action-tail initialization can match or outperform a native 10-step Gaussian baseline using fewer denoising steps. However, the optimal denoising budget varies substantially …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24804 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Lifelong robot learning requires acquiring new tasks sequentially without forgetting earlier ones. With large pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) backbones, adapter-based methods effectively mitigate this challenge. However, their task-specific adapters and selection modules accumulate with the task stream, creating a scalability challenge in on-disk storage and deployment cost under fixed onboard resource budgets. We propose SARAM, a lifelong learning framework that limits storage growth while keeping GPU memory and per-step inference cost independent of the task stream length. For each …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24747 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

The scan-then-revisit workflow of upper gastrointestinal endoscopy requires bringing a previously observed suspicious region back into view for closer inspection. Acquiring such targets requires translating anatomical and appearance descriptions into camera motions from partial observations of a confined, deformable environment. We present EndoVLA-OOV, a language-conditioned vision-language-action policy for out-of-view target acquisition in robotic endoscopy. The policy adapts a pretrained backbone to continuous two-degree-of-freedom distal bending commands and combines initial, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24705 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Spatial understanding is essential for robots to perceive their surrounding environments and execute actions. Existing approaches typically encode 3D awareness into vision-language-action (VLA) models by directly aligning their representations with pre-trained 3D foundation models. However, we observe that such direct geometric feature alignment essentially exploits 3D foundation priors as a form of low-rank regularization in the feature space, resulting in severe rank collapse of the pre-trained VLA representations. In contrast, we shift the focus from enforcing point-wise equality to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24590 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for autonomous driving. However, the massive parameter scale of VLAs strains onboard computational resources during real-time inference. This directly increases energy consumption and limits vehicle battery range, making it critical to minimize computational overhead without compromising driving capability and explainability. Current research on efficient VLA-based driving focuses on sequential adaptation (\textit{e.g.}, Chain-of-Thought and token adjustment), leaving structural adaptation underexplored despite parameter …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24587 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

LIBERO has emerged as a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating robotic manipulation policies. However, strong performance on LIBERO does not necessarily indicate robust embodied capabilities, as models may exploit benchmark-specific regularities rather than generalize to diverse operating conditions. In this work, we introduce LIBERO-Pro2.0, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating the robustness of embodied foundation models under distribution shifts. LIBERO-Pro2.0 encompasses 22 static perturbations and 20 runtime interventions across six dimensions: Condition, Environment, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24573 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Frozen Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies cannot incorporate previously encountered failures without updating the underlying model. We present retrieval-triggered projection correction (RTPC), an auditable external-memory wrapper for frozen OpenVLA policies that retrieves stress-collected local-depth records and applies translation-only projection correction while keeping rotation and gripper commands unchanged. RTPC is evaluated on CALVIN single-task manipulation using primary and independent replication cohorts. In the primary evaluation, RTPC reduced a depth-based near-collision or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24507 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies must ground language instructions in the right objects, contact points, and target locations for reliable manipulation. Human gaze provides a natural signal for this grounding, but existing robot datasets rarely pair real human gaze with the multi-camera observations used by modern policies. We introduce GazeAct, a gaze-equipped real-robot manipulation dataset and training framework for multi-view VLA policies. Using screen-based teleoperation, we record gaze directly on the robot camera feed viewed by the operator, yielding 12000 demonstrations across 40 …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24012 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Developing autonomous electric wheelchairs capable of long-horizon sidewalk navigation is critical for accessible personal mobility, yet existing approaches either focus on indoor map-based navigation or rely on expensive, complex sensor stacks to achieve full autonomy. In this work, we propose to tackle outdoor sidewalk navigation by leveraging visual navigation foundation models and large-scale navigation datasets, which offer strong generalization using lightweight hardware. To this end, we present ChairNav, a novel framework that adapts a general visual navigation model into a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23880 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Layer pruning reduces the size and inference cost of vision-language-action (VLA) models, but selecting a deployable configuration requires deciding both which layers to remove and how to recover task performance. These decisions depend on the model and task, and a failed trial can reflect either the deletion set or insufficient recovery. We present AutoPruner, an agent-driven framework that jointly searches pruning structures and recovery recipes through closed-loop experimentation. Offline layer interventions measure changes in action output to provide functional evidence. An LLM agent …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23566 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable language-guided robot manipulation, but remain vulnerable to visual attacks that undermine user control over robot behavior. Prior studies optimize visual perturbations using fixed target supervision. However, the perturbation can change earlier actions and, in turn, the physical states reached later. As the attacked trajectory evolves, this supervision may no longer match the behavior needed at the states actually reached. Accurately matching these targets can therefore fail to advance the attacker-specified task. Even with suitable supervision, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23378 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Robots manipulating objects in clutter must decide not only how to act, but also where to look. Although active camera motion can expose an occluded target, it may move the robot into an initial observation-state distribution that differs from the manipulation policy's training distribution. We identify this problem as first-frame distribution sensitivity: under perturbed starts in LIBERO, naively prepending camera repositioning to pi_0.5 reduces success from 46.3% to 11.5%. We introduce ActiveAlign, a data-adaptation framework that trains a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy from the states …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23372 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

When we say that a robot uses memory, does that memory actually play a role? Success-rate ablations alone cannot establish the use of task-relevant facts: they change information and computation together, while aggregate rates can hide offsetting gains and losses. We propose an Interventional Memory Evaluation Protocol (IMEP) for vision-language-action (VLA) systems to address four questions: (1) Does memory provide a net benefit? (2) Under what conditions does memory help? (3) Do changes to memory alter task outcomes? (4) Are these effects specific to task-relevant facts? At the retrieval …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23319 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Long-horizon robotic tasks expose a fundamental limitation of current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models because their restricted temporal context pre-vents effective accumulation and reuse of past experiences. As a result, memory has become a fundamental component for enabling embodied agents to perform long-horizon reasoning and adaptive decision-making. This survey presents a systematic taxonomy of VLA memory mechanisms based on memory scope and persistence, categorizing existing approaches into five representative paradigms and one emerging frontier. Based on this taxonomy, we compare …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23288 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Action Models (WAMs) have expanded the manipulation and whole body capabilities of individual robots. Yet a single robot remains limited by its embodiment, and many real world tasks require capabilities that can only emerge through cooperation. Existing multi robot frameworks largely emphasize task decomposition, allocation, and replanning, while providing limited support for adapting executable coordination when physical execution deviates from the intended behavior. We present CoEvolve, a framework that represents team …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23271 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models promise generalist robotic agents, yet consolidating skills learned across heterogeneous tasks and environments remains difficult: training data is fragmented across platforms, joint multi-task training suffers from interference, and model merging tends to introduce parameter conflicts or require architectural changes. We instead advocate a paradigm in which skills are first learned independently and then consolidated post hoc. To this end, we propose NestedVLA, which replaces parameter aggregation with parameter generation: a nested hypernetwork, …