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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02055v2
• Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2025 06:24:50 GMT
• Title: Align-Then-stEer: Adapting the Vision-Language Action Models through Unified Latent Guidance
• Authors: Yang Zhang, Chenwei Wang, Ouyang Lu, Yuan Zhao, Yunfei Ge, Zhenglong Sun, Xiu Li, Chi Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Xuelong Li,
• Abstract summary: We introduce textbfAlign-Then-stEer (textttATE), a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework.<n>Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.
• Score: 63.33213516925946
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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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