PaCo-VLA: Passivity-Shielded Compliance Prior for Contact-Rich Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00515v1
• Date: Sat, 30 May 2026 04:06:39 GMT
• Title: PaCo-VLA: Passivity-Shielded Compliance Prior for Contact-Rich Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
• Abstract summary: Contact-rich manipulation demands both high-level semantic reasoning and the safe regulation of high-frequency contact dynamics.<n>We introduce PaCo-VLA, a passivity-shielded compliance prior that recasts the VLA interface.
• Score: 16.000925198937082
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation demands both high-level semantic reasoning and the safe regulation of high-frequency contact dynamics. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide unprecedented semantic generalization, their low-rate outputs lack the reliability required for direct plant authority in force-sensitive tasks. To bridge this semantic-to-control gap, we introduce PaCo-VLA, a passivity-shielded compliance prior that recasts the VLA interface. Rather than trusting VLAs with direct motor commands, PaCo-VLA treats network outputs as task-level compliance proposals: semantic bindings, task stages, and admittance schedules. A high-frequency, proposal-independent passivity shield governs these proposals through energy-tank accounting and boundary checks, preventing invalid, stale, or unverified model predictions from bypassing low-level contact physics. This decoupled architecture also enables causal evaluation, isolating semantic contributions from geometric shortcuts. Extensive simulated and real-world connector-insertion experiments demonstrate that PaCo-VLA achieves superior precision over unshielded VLA baselines, sustaining zero passivity violations even under adversarial compliance shifts. This framework establishes a provably sampled-passive runtime contract at the admittance port and provides a runtime interface for deploying foundation models in contact-rich domains.

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