FG-CLTP: Fine-Grained Contrastive Language Tactile Pretraining for Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on visual perception limits robustness in contact-rich environments, where critical physical interaction states may not be visually observable. Existing tactile-enhanced VLA methods improve physical grounding using observed tactile feedback, but most remain largely reactive rather than explicitly modeling how contact may evolve. Therefore, we propose ForeTac-VLA, a forecasting-based tactile-vision-language fusion model that predicts future tactile states to guide action generation. Specifically, ForeTac-VLA encodes recent tactile observations into temporal representations and integrates them with vision-language features through bidirectional cross-attention. Further, a transformer-based forecasting module predicts multi-step future tactile states, enabling the model to reason jointly over observed and anticipated contact. Finally, the fused multimodal representations and predicted future tactile states are fed into the VLA backbone to condition action generation. To stabilize training, a ground-truth-to-prediction curriculum is employed when early forecasts are unreliable. Across four real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ForeTac-VLA achieves an average success rate of 95%, outperforming the fine-tuned VLA model by 36.25 percentage points and state-of-the-art tactile-enhanced VLA baselines by over 22 percentage points. ForeTac-VLA also maintains strong performance under low-illumination and visually cluttered conditions. Video demonstrations can be found on https://foretac-vla.github.io/

Tactile sensing provides essential contact information for robotic manipulation, yet incorporating it into pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging. A common concern is that simply introducing touch during task-specific fine-tuning may fail to bridge the cross-modal gap, yielding limited gains or even reduced success. Consequently, existing methods often rely on large-scale tactile policy pretraining or separate visuotactile alignment, adding data requirements and training stages. We introduce SimpleTouch, a simple VLA extension that augments $π_{0.5}$ with a tactile expert, to test whether these additional stages are necessary. Leveraging all tokens from a frozen pretrained tactile encoder, the expert learns from action supervision and multi-horizon prediction of future tactile latents. This single-stage training uses only task demonstrations, without additional tactile policy pretraining or separate alignment. With 50 demonstrations per task, SimpleTouch achieves the highest success rate among evaluated methods on all six UniVTAC tasks. Its average success rate reaches 77.5%, compared with 45.2% for FTP-$π_{0.5}$ and 66.7% for FTP-1, corresponding to gains of 32.3 and 10.8 percentage points, respectively. Across four real-world tasks, it averages 71.3%, exceeding FTP-1 by 8.8 percentage points. These results demonstrate that, given pretrained VLA and tactile representations, additional tactile policy pretraining is not a prerequisite for strong performance on these tasks, offering a simpler route to contact-rich manipulation. Project page: https://simpletouch-robot.github.io/

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant advantages in robotic manipulation. However, their reliance on vision and language often leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving visual occlusion, fine-grained manipulation, and physical contact. To address these challenges, we propose TacVLA, a fine-tuned VLA model by incorporating tactile modalities into the transformer-based policy to enhance fine-grained manipulation capabilities. Specifically, we introduce a contact-aware gating mechanism that selectively activates tactile tokens only when contact is detected, enabling adaptive multimodal fusion while avoiding irrelevant tactile interference. The fused visual, language, and tactile tokens are jointly processed within the transformer architecture to strengthen cross-modal grounding during contact-rich interaction. Extensive experiments on constraint-locked disassembly, in-box picking and robustness evaluations demonstrate that TacVLA outperforms baselines, %including existing VLA models and diffusion policies, improving the performance by averaging 20% success rate in disassembly and 60% in in-box picking, achieving a 2.1$\times$ improvement under visual occlusion, and showing recovery behavior under human disturbance. Videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/tacvla.