ICI-VLA: In-Context Imitation with Spatiotemporally Aligned Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07581v1
• Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:55:35 GMT
• Title: ICI-VLA: In-Context Imitation with Spatiotemporally Aligned Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Models
• Abstract summary: We present ICI-VLA, a training and retrieval framework that equips a text-action VLM with few-shot test-time adaptation through in-context demonstrations.<n>ICI-VLA updates its parameters only during offline training; at inference, the policy remains fixed and conditions action generation on retrieved micro-demonstrations.
• Score: 9.31323513616827
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly adapted to new manipulation settings through additional gradient updates, which limits rapid deployment when task-specific data or compute is scarce. We present ICI-VLA, a training and retrieval framework that equips a text-action VLM with few-shot test-time adaptation through in-context demonstrations. Unlike mainstream VLA designs based on action-specific multimodal fusion, ICI-VLA retains the native text-generation interface. ICI-VLA updates its parameters only during offline training; at inference, the policy remains fixed and conditions action generation on retrieved micro-demonstrations. The framework decomposes long trajectories into short, semantically labeled examples and trains an RD-Encoder with positives mined by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), aligning the retrieved context with the phase and geometry of the current subtask. We further introduce Target Action Masking, a context-corruption objective designed to reduce direct action copying and increase reliance on the current observation. ICI-VLA reaches average success rates of 97.7% on LIBERO and 60.4% on RoboTwin 2.0, exceeding the highest reported baseline average on RoboTwin 2.0 by 19.3 percentage points. It also achieves 83.2% across four physical tasks. These results indicate that a fixed VLA policy can benefit from conditioning on spatiotemporally aligned demonstrations at test time.

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