Reshaping Action Error Distributions for Reliable Vision-Language-Action Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04228v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:37:09 GMT
• Title: Reshaping Action Error Distributions for Reliable Vision-Language-Action Models
• Abstract summary: In robotic manipulation, vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning generalizable and scalable robot policies.<n>We focus on continuous-action VLA models and move beyond conventional MSE-based regression by reshaping action error distributions during training.<n>We evaluate our approaches across standard, few-shot, and noisy settings on multiple representative VLA architectures.
• Score: 69.38615670891038
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In robotic manipulation, vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning generalizable and scalable robot policies. Most existing VLA frameworks rely on standard supervised objectives, typically cross-entropy for discrete actions and mean squared error (MSE) for continuous action regression, which impose strong pointwise constraints on individual predictions. In this work, we focus on continuous-action VLA models and move beyond conventional MSE-based regression by reshaping action error distributions during training. Drawing on information-theoretic principles, we introduce Minimum Error Entropy (MEE) into modern VLA architectures and propose a trajectory-level MEE objective, together with two weighted variants, combined with MSE for continuous-action VLA training. We evaluate our approaches across standard, few-shot, and noisy settings on multiple representative VLA architectures, using simulation benchmarks such as LIBERO and SimplerEnv as well as real-world robotic manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in success rates and robustness across these settings. Under imbalanced data regimes, the gains persist within a well-characterized operating range, while incurring negligible additional training cost and no impact on inference efficiency. We further provide theoretical analyses that explain why MEE-based supervision is effective and characterize its practical range. Project Page: https://cognition2actionlab.github.io/VLA-TMEE.github.io/

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