Two Bridges, One Pathway: From VLMs to Generalizable VLAs with Embodied Trajectory-Coupled Data

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08520v1
• Date: Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:57:51 GMT
• Title: Two Bridges, One Pathway: From VLMs to Generalizable VLAs with Embodied Trajectory-Coupled Data
• Abstract summary: Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful general-purpose reasoners, yet converting them into robot control policies is surprisingly difficult.<n>We argue that this gap can be bridged gradually with the right intermediate data.<n>We show that mixing task-relevant out-of-distribution ETC data with a small amount of action data enables the model to generalize to novel visual-language conditions.
• Score: 93.7685703383343
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful general-purpose reasoners, yet converting them into robot control policies (VLAs) is surprisingly difficult. The root cause is a two-fold gap: VLMs are trained on internet-scale images with language-understanding objectives, while VLAs must perceive robot scenes and predict motor actions. Fine-tuning a VLM directly on robot action data forces the model to cross both gaps at once -- the learning curve is steep and the rich generalizations learned during pretraining tend to degrade rather than transfer. We argue that this gap can be bridged gradually with the right intermediate data. We introduce \emph{embodied trajectory-coupled (ETC) data} -- vision-language supervision derived from the same robot scenes and trajectories used for action learning. Because ETC data shares the visual context of robot operation while retaining familiar language-understanding objectives, it provides a natural stepping stone between VLM pretraining and VLA fine-tuning. Building on this, we design a three-stage training recipe. Distribution Bridging first adapts the VLM to embodied visual-language semantics. Objective Bridging then gradually shifts the model toward action prediction while preserving the acquired representations. Retentive Adaptation finally specializes the policy to the target deployment domain. We further show that mixing task-relevant out-of-distribution ETC data with a small amount of action data enables the model to generalize to novel visual-language conditions without requiring additional robot demonstrations. Simulation and real-robot experiments confirm that this gradual bridging strategy is the key to transferring VLM generalization into robust, deployable robot policies.

Related papers

• DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA [72.9197085473598]
  DIAL is a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck.<n>A VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space.<n>A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-31T15:02:27Z)
• ST4VLA: Spatially Guided Training for Vision-Language-Action Models [80.35847468618276]
  Large vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but fall short when extended to embodied tasks.<n>We introduce ST4VLA, a dual-system Vision-Language-Action framework to align action learning with spatial priors inVLMs.<n> Empirically, ST4VLA achieves substantial improvements over vanilla VLA, with performance increasing from 66.1 -> 84.6 on Google Robot and from 54.7 -> 73.2 on WidowX Robot.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-10T18:59:17Z)
• mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAs [5.109732854501585]
  We introduce mimic-video, a novel Video-Action Model (VAM) that pairs a pretrained Internet-scale video model with a flow matching-based action decoder conditioned on its latent representations.<n>Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, improving sample efficiency by 10x and convergence speed by 2x compared to traditional VLA architectures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-17T18:47:31Z)
• HAMSTER: Hierarchical Action Models For Open-World Robot Manipulation [54.03004125910057]
  We show that hierarchical vision-language-action models can be more effective in utilizing off-domain data than standard monolithic VLA models.<n>We show that, with the hierarchical design, the high-level VLM can transfer across significant domain gaps between the off-domain finetuning data and real-robot testing scenarios.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-08T07:50:22Z)
• Latent Action Pretraining from Videos [156.88613023078778]
  We introduce Latent Action Pretraining for general Action models (LAPA)<n>LAPA is an unsupervised method for pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models without ground-truth robot action labels.<n>We propose a method to learn from internet-scale videos that do not have robot action labels.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-15T16:28:09Z)
• LLaRA: Supercharging Robot Learning Data for Vision-Language Policy [56.505551117094534]
  We introduce LLaRA: Large Language and Robotics Assistant, a framework that formulates robot action policy as visuo-textual conversations.<n>First, we present an automated pipeline to generate conversation-style instruction tuning data for robots from existing behavior cloning datasets.<n>We show that a VLM finetuned with a limited amount of such datasets can produce meaningful action decisions for robotic control.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-28T17:59:12Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.