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ReVLA: Reverting Visual Domain Limitation of Robotic Foundation Models

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arxiv 2409.15250 v3 pith:GYN4ZZHE submitted 2024-09-23 cs.CV cs.RO

ReVLA: Reverting Visual Domain Limitation of Robotic Foundation Models

classification cs.CV cs.RO
keywords modelsvisualfoundationopenvlacatastrophicforgettingmodelrevla
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Recent progress in large language models and access to large-scale robotic datasets has sparked a paradigm shift in robotics models transforming them into generalists able to adapt to various tasks, scenes, and robot modalities. A large step for the community are open Vision Language Action models which showcase strong performance in a wide variety of tasks. In this work, we study the visual generalization capabilities of three existing robotic foundation models, and propose a corresponding evaluation framework. Our study shows that the existing models do not exhibit robustness to visual out-of-domain scenarios. This is potentially caused by limited variations in the training data and/or catastrophic forgetting, leading to domain limitations in the vision foundation models. We further explore OpenVLA, which uses two pre-trained vision foundation models and is, therefore, expected to generalize to out-of-domain experiments. However, we showcase catastrophic forgetting by DINO-v2 in OpenVLA through its failure to fulfill the task of depth regression. To overcome the aforementioned issue of visual catastrophic forgetting, we propose a gradual backbone reversal approach founded on model merging. This enables OpenVLA -- which requires the adaptation of the visual backbones during initial training -- to regain its visual generalization ability. Regaining this capability enables our ReVLA model to improve over OpenVLA by a factor of 77\% and 66\% for grasping and lifting in visual OOD tasks. Comprehensive evaluations, episode rollouts and model weights are available on the ReVLA Page

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. VLA-GSE: Boosting Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in VLA with Generalized and Specialized Experts

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    VLA-GSE improves VLA adaptation by initializing generalized shared experts and specialized routed experts via spectral decomposition of the backbone, outperforming full fine-tuning and other PEFT methods on robotic be...

  2. AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AR-VLA introduces a standalone autoregressive action expert with long-lived memory that generates context-aware continuous actions for VLAs, replacing chunk-based heads with smoother trajectories and maintained task success.

  3. SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SPEAR-1 combines a 3D-enriched VLM with embodied control to match or exceed existing robotic foundation models using 20 times fewer robot demonstrations.

  4. World Pilot: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models with World-Action Priors

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    World Pilot augments VLA policies with world-action priors through latent and action steering pathways, reporting 84.7% success on LIBERO-Plus zero-shot OOD and top real-robot results across four tasks.

  5. VLA-GSE: Boosting Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in VLA with Generalized and Specialized Experts

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    VLA-GSE uses spectral decomposition of the VLA backbone to create generalized and specialized experts, enabling effective robot task adaptation while updating only 2.51% of parameters and achieving 81.2% zero-shot suc...

  6. Safe-Night VLA: Seeing the Unseen via Thermal-Perceptive Vision-Language-Action Models for Safety-Critical Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 5.0

    Adding frozen-backbone thermal perception plus a control-barrier-function safety filter improves Franka manipulation success in temperature, buried-object, and mirror-deception tasks over RGB-only and RGB-D VLAs.