cs.ROOct 10, 2026

Flow-Support-Weighted Proposals for Test-Time Verified VLA Policies

Authors: Chen Zhao, Zipeng Ye, Haitao Shen, Guanlin Li, Yuchen Xie, Jing Zhang

Organizations: Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China · Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and KnowledgeEngineering, MOE, China · Meituan, Beijing 100102, China

Abstract

Test-time sampling promises to turn one action prediction into a set of distinct executable candidates that a verifier can choose among. Downstream fine-tuning works against that promise. A vision-language-action model trained to solve one task distribution concentrates its flow-matching decoder around the dominant demonstrated action, so repeated samples differ only marginally and the verifier receives many copies of one decision. We call this proposal contraction and identify it as a key constraint on test-time scaling: repeated samples can remain highly redundant as the candidate budget grows. Action Dynamic Sampling (ADS) alleviates the constraint on the proposal side, during training. At each training step, ADS integrates KK additional trajectories from the current policy under fresh base noise, scores each by the flow support along its path with a Hutchinson trace estimator, and corrects the policy's local action distribution toward this weighted set through a detached finite-set KL term. Training cost rises; deployment cost is unchanged. Across simulation and four physical-robot tasks, ADS raises proposal spread without the success penalty that Gaussian perturbation incurs, lifts oracle best-of-8 success on RoboCasa from 57.6% to 63.0%, improves fixed verifiers by 2.4 to 4.9 points in simulation, and raises TokenPB by up to 13.0 points on real-world manipulation.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables18 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Oct 4, 2026

DiVeR: Decision-Critical Verifier Learning for VLA Test-Time Scaling

Scaling robot data and model capacity has improved Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, but further progress is constrained by the high cost of robotic data. Verifier-guided test-time scaling offers an efficient alternative by sampling multiple action candidates and selecting the one most likely to lead to task success at inference time. Existing classification-based verifiers learn from trajectory-level outcomes but treat all visited states equally, even though their value for candidate discrimination can vary across a trajectory. At many states, plausible actions are similar and provide limited discrimination signal, while only a sparse set of decision-critical states admits meaningfully different actions that can substantially affect downstream outcomes. To address this, we propose DiVeR, which estimates decision criticality from the dispersion of sampled action representations. DiVeR then uses this signal to reweight verifier learning toward states where action selection is most consequential, without requiring step-level annotations or additional environment interaction. Across LIBERO, RoboCasa, and real-world experiments on a Franka Research 3 robot, DiVeR consistently improves task success through more effective verifier-guided action selection, while adding negligible verifier inference overhead.
Oct 10, 2026

Verify, Act, Distill: Turning Test-Time Compute into Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Test-time compute (TTC), which scores multiple candidate actions at inference time, is a powerful way to improve the execution performance of vision-language-action (VLA) models, but existing methods keep the policy frozen, so the gain must be recomputed at every execution. We propose Verify, Act, Distill, a framework that consolidates the gains of TTC into the VLA itself. A fixed verifier scores candidates generated by a flow-matching VLA, the weighted aggregate is executed, and the observations and aggregated chunks from successful adaptation episodes are distilled directly into LoRA parameters with the standard flow-matching loss. This reuses supervision that TTC has already produced during execution, without additional reinforcement learning or rollouts dedicated to teacher generation. On the 40 LIBERO tasks with a SmolVLA 5k checkpoint, distilling from only 10 episodes per task raises the mean success rate of verifier-free single-candidate generation from 54.1% to 70.6%, retaining about 74% of the improvement obtained by aggregating eight candidates. Applying the same aggregation to the distilled policy further raises the success rate from 76.4% to 82.3%, with a particularly large gain on LIBERO-Long (44.0% to 57.8%), and the single-candidate policy also improves on LIBERO-plus, which contains distribution shifts. These results show that using verification as a learning signal, rather than only as an execution-time selector, both retains the improvements of TTC and re-amplifies the effect of subsequent TTC.
Sep 18, 2026

Fewer Steps, Better Actions: Rethinking Flow-Matching Inference for VLA Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies based on flow matching generate action chunks through repeated evaluations of an action expert. Increasing the number of integration steps raises inference cost, but does not necessarily improve closed-loop success. We propose Coda, which reallocates part of this integration budget to a single learned endpoint correction. A frozen policy first completes a few-step noise-to-action trajectory; a lightweight Transformer then predicts a demonstration-supervised residual using the candidate action, source noise, and shared observation-prefix cache. Only the corrector is trained. On 50 RoboTwin Easy tasks, five-step Coda improves success from 71.64% to 74.68% over the matched five-step baseline, while reducing forward latency by 30.2% relative to the default ten-step policy. A two-step configuration achieves 71.88% success with a 2.12×\times speedup. An independent 13-task control shows a 5.69-percentage-point gain at nearly equal latency, supporting correction as an effective alternative to additional integration. The same design also improves frozen official SmolVLA, raising two-step success from 60.8% to 69.4%. These results show that endpoint correction improves the quality-latency trade-off of frozen flow-matching policies.