GS-VLA: Plug-and-Play Viewpoint Canonicalization for Frozen VLA Policies via Gaussian Splatting
Organizations: Dankook University Yongin, Republic of Korea · Dept. of EEE, Dankook University Yongin, Republic of Korea
Abstract
This paper proposes a lightweight, plug-and-play framework that improves robustness to viewpoint shifts in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies without policy retraining. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to directly leverage 3D Gaussian-based novel-view synthesis for observation-space adaptation in VLA policies. Current VLA performance relies on the implicit assumption that training and deployment camera configurations are identical. Our experiments show that even a small displacement of the camera mount can reduce the success rate on the LIBERO benchmark from about 90% to about 10% in the worst case. Prior approaches, such as large-scale fine-tuning or generative data augmentation, are computationally expensive and risk catastrophic forgetting. To address this, viewpoint shifts are reformulated as a localized novel-view synthesis problem. Under a Locality assumption, that camera perturbations remain within a small bounded region relative to the workspace, viewpoint normalization reduces to a scene- and policy-independent disocclusion task. Our work implements this idea with a 4M-parameter 3D-Gaussian canonicalizer prepended to a frozen VLA policy. Without modifying policy weights, GS-VLA improves performance across three orthogonal axes: (1) Policy architectures, (2) Unseen task suites, and (3) Perturbation scales. These results show that a lightweight visual module can recover a large fraction of the performance lost under viewpoint shift, without policy retraining.
Figures & tables
| Policy / Setting | Suite | No canon | Fwd-warp | GS-VLA (ours) | (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SR (%) | SR (%) | SR (%) | |||
| (a) Cross-policy generalization ( cm, ep) | |||||
| XVLA | spatial | ||||
| OpenVLA-OFT (7 B) | object | ||||
| RynnVLA-002 | spatial | ||||
| (3.4 B) | spatial | ||||
| Method \ (cm) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No canon | ||||||
| GS-VLA (ours) | ||||||
| (pp) |
| Yaw | cm | cm |
|---|---|---|
| ( ) | ( ) | |
| ( ) | ( ) |
| Calib. noise | object | spatial | goal | libero_10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SR (%) | SR (%) | SR (%) | SR (%) | |
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Mode | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| libero_spatial ( ) | ||||
| Translation | ||||
| Rotation | ||||
| Joint | ||||
| libero_object ( ) | ||||
| Translation | – | – | – | |
| Link | Quantity | Slope | |
|---|---|---|---|
| joint slope (Tab. 5 ) | |||
| predictor linearity | |||
| policy Lipschitz | pp/L 1 | ||
| (composite) | end-to-end ( ) | pp/ |
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| Backbone | Symmetric U-Net, base width , 4 down-/up-sampling levels |
| Conv block | FiLM-modulated ConvBlock at every scale |
| Pose embedding | , 2-layer |
| Input | , |
| Per-pixel output | 14-dim Gaussian descriptor |
| Centre clamp | ( of local depth) |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Optimizer | AdamW ( , , weight decay ) |
| Base learning rate | |
| LR schedule | -step linear warmup (start factor ), then cosine to |
| Batch size | |
| Epochs | |
| Gradient clipping | global norm |
| Stage | Per-frame cost (A5000) |
|---|---|
| U-Net forward | ms |
| Differentiable -splat ( gsplat ) | ms |
| Total canonicalizer | ms ( Hz) |
| Rasterizer config | vertical FOV, bilinear splatting |
| Policy | Suite | No canon | GS-VLA (ours) | (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (3.4 B) | spatial | |||
| object | ||||
| goal | ||||
| libero_10 | ||||
| OpenVLA-OFT (7 B) | spatial | |||
| object |
| Suite (GS-VLA) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| spatial | ||||||
| object | ||||||
| goal | ||||||
| libero_10 |
| Condition | pos (m) | lookat | No canon | GS-VLA (ours) | (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (low) † | n/a | n/a | |||
| (default, ) | |||||
| (bigrand) ‡ | |||||
| (extreme) ‡ |
| Base | Params | PSNR (dB) | SR (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| M | – | ||
| M | – | ||
| (ours) | M | ||
| M |
| Pairs | PSNR (dB) | SR (%) |
|---|---|---|
| k | ||
| k | ||
| k (ours) |
| fov y | SR (%) | vs. ref |
|---|---|---|
| (zoom-in) | ||
| ref ( ) (ours) | – | |
| (zoom-out) |
| Depth source | Encoder | val | SR (%) |
| GT depth (upper bound) (ours) | – | – | |
| Calibration only (no fine-tune) | |||
| DA V2, raw inverse | ViT-S | – | |
| DA V2, metric indoor | ViT-S | – | |
| Fine-tuned on k LIBERO pairs (3 ep, + edge-aware) | |||
| DA V2-S, FT | ViT-S | ||
Robustness of VLA Models
Robustness of vision-language-action (VLA) models concerns reliable robot behavior under changes to language, vision, sensors, tasks, and hardware.
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