GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization
Xiaosong Jia, Bowen Yang, Zuhao Ge, Xian Nie, Yuchen Zhou, Cunxin Fan, Yufeng Li, Yilin Chai, Chao Jing, Zijian Liang, Qingwen Bu, Haidong Cao, Chao Wu, Qifeng Li, Zhenjie Yang, Chenhe Zhang, Hongyang Li, Zuxuan Wu, Junchi Yan, Yu-Gang Jiang · · 2026
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Summary
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn...
Abstract Summary
Key Points
- Introduces GuidedVLA, advancing vla research.
- Detailed evaluation demonstrates effectiveness on benchmarks and real-world scenarios.
- Provides insights into methodology and architectural choices.
Abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn task-relevant features. However, without explicit guidance, these models often overfit to spurious correlations, such as visual shortcuts or environmental noise, limiting their generalization. In this paper, we introduce GuidedVLA, a framework designed to manually guide the action generation to focus on task-relevant factors. Our core insight is to treat the action decoder not as a monolithic learner, but as an assembly of functional components. Individual attention heads are supervised by manually defined auxiliary signals to capture distinct factors. As an initial study, we instantiate this paradigm with three specialized heads: object grounding, spatial geometry, and temporal skill logic. Across simulation and real-robot experiments, GuidedVLA improves success rates in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings compared to strong VLA baselines. Finally, we show that the quality of these specialized factors correlates positively with task performance and that our mechanism yields decoupled, high-quality features. Our results suggest that explicitly guiding action-decoder learning is a promising direction for building more robust and general VLA models.
Links
- Paper (PDF): 2605.12369
- arXiv: 2605.12369
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