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Align-Then-stEer: Adapting the Vision-Language Action Models through Unified Latent Guidance

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arxiv 2509.02055 v2 pith:SKQLJQSC submitted 2025-09-02 cs.RO cs.AI

Align-Then-stEer: Adapting the Vision-Language Action Models through Unified Latent Guidance

classification cs.RO cs.AI
keywords actionmodelsfine-tuninglatenttextbfadaptationadaptingalign-then-steer
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from the pre-training data. This discrepancy leads to a significant mismatch in action distributions, demanding extensive data and compute for effective fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{Align-Then-stEer (\texttt{ATE})}, a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework. \texttt{ATE} first aligns disparate action spaces by constructing a unified latent space, where a variational autoencoder constrained by reverse KL divergence embeds adaptation actions into modes of the pre-training action latent distribution. Subsequently, it steers the diffusion- or flow-based VLA's generation process during fine-tuning via a guidance mechanism that pushes the model's output distribution towards the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-embodiment and cross-task manipulation in both simulation and real world. Compared to direct fine-tuning of representative VLAs, our method improves the average multi-task success rate by up to \textbf{9.8\%} in simulation and achieves a striking \textbf{32\% success rate gain} in a real-world cross-embodiment setting. Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    APT pretrains the action expert as a vision-action prior on frozen VLM features then adds language through gated fusion to improve OOD instruction generalization in continuous-action VLA policies.

  2. From Pixels to Tokens: A Systematic Study of Latent Action Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A unified comparison of latent action supervision strategies for VLA models reveals task-specific benefits, with image-based approaches aiding reasoning and generalization, action-based aiding motor control, and discr...

  3. $\pi^{*}_{0.6}$: a VLA That Learns From Experience

    cs.LG 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RECAP enables a generalist VLA to self-improve via advantage-conditioned RL on mixed real-world data, more than doubling throughput and halving failure rates on hard manipulation tasks.

  4. Vision Language Action (VLA) Models for Unmanned Aerial Robotics and Bimanual Manipulation: A Review

    cs.RO 2026-07 accept novelty 5.5

    Bimanual VLA coordination strategies, training recipes, and continuous action chunking transfer to unmanned aerial systems; the survey maps 183 works and lists fourteen shared research directions.

  5. VLA-Pro: Cross-Task Procedural Memory Transfer for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    VLA-Pro improves cross-task generalization in vision-language-action models by storing task-specific LoRA adapters as procedural memories and retrieving/fusing them at inference.

  6. XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representations

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    XR-1 introduces Unified Vision-Motion Codes learned by dual-branch VQ-VAE and applies them in a three-stage training pipeline to outperform prior VLA models on 120+ real-world manipulation tasks across six robot embodiments.