TS-Mask VLA: 2D Temporal-Spatial Masking for Vision-Language-Action Model with Effective Bridging

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09818v1
• Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:06:02 GMT
• Title: TS-Mask VLA: 2D Temporal-Spatial Masking for Vision-Language-Action Model with Effective Bridging
• Abstract summary: TS-Mask VLA is a vision-language-action framework for robot manipulation.<n>It is built upon two key designs: (1) a Discrete Action Expert equipped with a Bridge Attention conditioning bridge and (2) a temporal-spatial 2D masking strategy.<n>It achieves a 9 percent average success rate with only 0.5B parameters, outperforming significantly larger models.
• Score: 18.666233973595762
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to understand natural-language instructions and visual observations, and to generate and execute corresponding actions as embodied agents. Recently, autoregressive token-based action generation has driven the development of many representative VLA models. However, this paradigm often reduces action generation to next-token prediction, thereby lacking explicit modeling of the spatiotemporal structure of action sequences and the disentanglement between vision-language representations and actions, which can limit performance in long-horizon and complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose TS-Mask VLA, a vision-language-action framework for robot manipulation. TS-Mask VLA is built upon two key designs: (1) a Discrete Diffusion Action Expert equipped with a Bridge Attention conditioning bridge, which enables multi-layer conditioning from the VLM and facilitates more accurate and stable action generation; and (2) a temporal-spatial 2D masking strategy for discrete action tokens that strengthens the model's understanding of cross-time dependencies and inter-dimensional coupling, leading to more structurally consistent action sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks. On LIBERO, TS-Mask VLA achieves a 95.7 percent average success rate with only 0.5B parameters, outperforming significantly larger models. On CALVIN, it attains the best average sequence length of 4.19 and strong long-horizon performance. Comprehensive analyses and ablations further validate the effectiveness of our design.

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