Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on end-to-end fine-tuning. While effective, this paradigm compromises the inherent generalization capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and incurs catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose M2-VLA, which demonstrates that a generalized VLM is able to serve as a powerful backbone for robotic manipulation directly. However, it remains a key challenge to bridge the gap between the high-level semantic understanding of VLMs and the precise requirements of robotic control. To overcome this, we introduce the Mixture of Layers (MoL) strategy that selectively extracts task-critical information from dense semantic features. Furthermore, to facilitate efficient trajectory learning under constrained model capacity, we propose a Meta Skill Module (MSM) that integrates strong inductive biases. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, generalization and ablation studies validate the architecture's zero-shot capabilities and confirm the contribution of each key component. Our code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.
Vision-Language-Action~(VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet they still struggle to generalize to unseen tasks that necessitate transferring relevant experience across objects, scenes, and action patterns. This paper proposes VLA-Pro, a plug-and-play framework designed to enhance cross-task generalization by storing task-relevant procedural memories at training time and transferring these memories during inference. Specifically, VLA-Pro stores task-specific LoRA adapters as parameterized procedural memories during training. At inference time, VLA-Pro retrieves relevant procedural memories based on the current multi-modal context and dynamically fuses these memories for generating the current action chunk. Experiments on RoboTwin, RLBench, and real-world manipulation tasks show that VLA-Pro consistently improves cross-task generalization across multiple backbones, achieving up to a 207% relative improvement in simulation and increasing real-world success rate from 5.8% to 65.0%. These results suggest that procedural memory retrieval and adaptation provide an effective mechanism for transferring manipulation experience to novel tasks while preserving modularity and execution stability.
Deploying generalist robotic agents in the real world requires transferable skills. Specifically, a policy trained to clone a behavior from object-specific demonstrations must generalize beyond that object, otherwise data collection requirements become intractable. Recently, fine-tuning of pre-trained billion-parameter Vision-Language Models (VLMs), initially on large-scale robot datasets and then on fewer scenario-specific demonstrations, has emerged as the predominant paradigm for designing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While these policies achieve state-of-the-art manipulation performance in-distribution, they remain brittle to minor spatial, semantic, and task variations. In this work, we address the inability of current models to decouple the declarative (i.e., concepts and entity semantics) from the procedural knowledge (i.e., how to do something) encoded in their parameters, which is a fundamental bottleneck for zero-shot skill transfer to novel objects. To address this, we propose w2VLA, a new VLA model with restructured information flow. Rather than feeding all multimodal tokens from the VLM encoder into a large, opaque transformer-based action expert, our approach modulates the robot state sequence with visual, spatial, and skill information in a compositional and interpretable manner. Unlike popular, state-of-the-art VLAs, we show that our modular approach successfully decouples knowledge representations, enabling robust behavior cloning and unprecedented zero-shot skill transfer capabilities across dissimilar, unseen objects.
Nikolaos Tsagkas, Andreas Sochopoulos, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu +2
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate vision-language understanding with executable robot actions, enabling end-to-end learning for robot control. However, our empirical analysis reveals that existing models exhibit severe trajectory overfitting when finetuned on limited datasets. To guide the model in effectively utilizing wrist camera information, we propose MaskVLA, a masking-based fine-tuning strategy. By randomly masking a small portion of the main camera's visual information, the model is guided to autonomously learn more fine-grained, task-relevant, and effective visual features. This process leads to the emergence of robust policies, thereby enhancing the model's capability to tackle complex manipulation tasks and improving its generalization performance. Our method has been comprehensively evaluated on RoboTwin 2.0, achieving an average success rate improvement of 23.2% and 16.8% compared to π0 and OpenVLA-OFT, respectively. Furthermore, experiments on real-world ALOHA robots also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.