ROApr 19Code
World-Value-Action Model: Implicit Planning for Vision-Language-Action SystemsRunze Li, Hongyin Zhang, Junxi Jin et al.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for building embodied agents that ground perception and language into action. However, most existing approaches rely on direct action prediction, lacking the ability to reason over long-horizon trajectories and evaluate their consequences, which limits performance in complex decision-making tasks. In this work, we introduce World-Value-Action (WAV) model, a unified framework that enables implicit planning in VLA systems. Rather than performing explicit trajectory optimization, WAV model learn a structured latent representation of future trajectories conditioned on visual observations and language instructions. A learned world model predicts future states, while a trajectory value function evaluates their long-horizon utility. Action generation is then formulated as inference in this latent space, where the model progressively concentrates probability mass on high-value and dynamically feasible trajectories. We provide a theoretical perspective showing that planning directly in action space suffers from an exponential decay in the probability of feasible trajectories as the horizon increases. In contrast, latent-space inference reshapes the search distribution toward feasible regions, enabling efficient long-horizon decision making. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that the WAV model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in task success rate, generalization ability, and robustness, especially in long-horizon and compositional scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/Win-commit/WAV.
ROFeb 3
CMR: Contractive Mapping Embeddings for Robust Humanoid Locomotion on Unstructured TerrainsQixin Zeng, Hongyin Zhang, Shangke Lyu et al.
Robust disturbance rejection remains a longstanding challenge in humanoid locomotion, particularly on unstructured terrains where sensing is unreliable and model mismatch is pronounced. While perception information, such as height map, enhances terrain awareness, sensor noise and sim-to-real gaps can destabilize policies in practice. In this work, we provide theoretical analysis that bounds the return gap under observation noise, when the induced latent dynamics are contractive. Furthermore, we present Contractive Mapping for Robustness (CMR) framework that maps high-dimensional, disturbance-prone observations into a latent space, where local perturbations are attenuated over time. Specifically, this approach couples contrastive representation learning with Lipschitz regularization to preserve task-relevant geometry while explicitly controlling sensitivity. Notably, the formulation can be incorporated into modern deep reinforcement learning pipelines as an auxiliary loss term with minimal additional technical effort required. Further, our extensive humanoid experiments show that CMR potently outperforms other locomotion algorithms under increased noise.
RONov 3, 2025
RobustVLA: Robustness-Aware Reinforcement Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action ModelsHongyin Zhang, Shuo Zhang, Junxi Jin et al.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as powerful general-purpose policies for robotic manipulation, benefiting from large-scale multi-modal pre-training. However, they often fail to generalize reliably in out-of-distribution deployments, where unavoidable disturbances such as observation noise, sensor errors, or actuation perturbations become prevalent. While recent Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based post-training provides a practical means to adapt pre-trained VLA models, existing methods mainly emphasize reward maximization and overlook robustness to environmental uncertainty. In this work, we introduce RobustVLA, a lightweight online RL post-training method designed to explicitly enhance the resilience of VLA models. Through a systematic robustness analysis, we identify two key regularizations: Jacobian regularization, which mitigates sensitivity to observation noise, and smoothness regularization, which stabilizes policies under action perturbations. Extensive experiments across diverse robotic environments demonstrate that RobustVLA significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in robustness and reliability. Our results highlight the importance of principled robustness-aware RL post-training as a key step toward improving the reliability and robustness of VLA models.
ROSep 4, 2025
Balancing Signal and Variance: Adaptive Offline RL Post-Training for VLA Flow ModelsHongyin Zhang, Shiyuan Zhang, Junxi Jin et al.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models based on flow matching have shown excellent performance in general-purpose robotic manipulation tasks. However, the action accuracy of these models on complex downstream tasks is unsatisfactory. One important reason is that these models rely solely on the post-training paradigm of imitation learning, which makes it difficult to have a deeper understanding of the distribution properties of data quality, which is exactly what Reinforcement Learning (RL) excels at. In this paper, we theoretically propose an offline RL post-training objective for VLA flow models and induce an efficient and feasible offline RL fine-tuning algorithm -- Adaptive Reinforced Flow Matching (ARFM). By introducing an adaptively adjusted scaling factor in the VLA flow model loss, we construct a principled bias-variance trade-off objective function to optimally control the impact of RL signal on flow loss. ARFM adaptively balances RL advantage preservation and flow loss gradient variance control, resulting in a more stable and efficient fine-tuning process. Extensive simulation and real-world experimental results show that ARFM exhibits excellent generalization, robustness, few-shot learning, and continuous learning performance.
CVNov 8, 2024
PEP-GS: Perceptually-Enhanced Precise Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive RenderingJunxi Jin, Xiulai Li, Haiping Huang et al.
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has achieved significant success in real-time, high-quality 3D scene rendering. However, it faces several challenges, including Gaussian redundancy, limited ability to capture view-dependent effects, and difficulties in handling complex lighting and specular reflections. Additionally, methods that use spherical harmonics for color representation often struggle to effectively capture anisotropic components, especially when modeling view-dependent colors under complex lighting conditions, leading to insufficient contrast and unnatural color saturation. To address these limitations, we introduce PEP-GS, a perceptually-enhanced framework that dynamically predicts Gaussian attributes, including opacity, color, and covariance. We replace traditional spherical harmonics with a Hierarchical Granular-Structural Attention mechanism, which enables more accurate modeling of complex view-dependent color effects. By employing a stable and interpretable framework for opacity and covariance estimation, PEP-GS avoids the removal of essential Gaussians prematurely, ensuring a more accurate scene representation. Furthermore, perceptual optimization is applied to the final rendered images, enhancing perceptual consistency across different views and ensuring high-quality renderings with improved texture fidelity and fine-scale detail preservation. Experimental results demonstrate that PEP-GS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios involving view-dependent effects and fine-scale details.