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VLA-Touch: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Dual-Level Tactile Feedback
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VLA-Touch: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Dual-Level Tactile Feedback
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Tactile feedback is generally recognized to be crucial for effective interaction with the physical world. However, state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models lack the ability to interpret and use tactile signals, limiting their effectiveness in contact-rich tasks. Incorporating tactile feedback into these systems is challenging due to the absence of large multi-modal datasets. We present VLA-Touch, an approach that enhances generalist robot policies with tactile sensing \emph{without fine-tuning} the base VLA. Our method introduces two key innovations: (1) a pipeline that leverages a pretrained tactile-language model that provides semantic tactile feedback for high-level task planning, and (2) a diffusion-based controller that refines VLA-generated actions with tactile signals for contact-rich manipulation. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our dual-level integration of tactile feedback improves task planning efficiency while enhancing execution precision. Code is open-sourced at \href{https://github.com/jxbi1010/VLA-Touch}{this URL}.
Forward citations
Cited by 31 Pith papers
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MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
MuseVLA adds on-demand sensor selection via tokens and converts readings into grounded sensor images for multimodal fusion, reporting 80.6% average success on real-robot dexterous tasks that need non-visual sensing.
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FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulation
FTP-1 is the first foundation tactile policy pretrained on ~3000 hours of data from 26 sources across 21 sensors that improves performance on seen setups by 17.2% and transfers to unseen sensors with 31% success rate gain.
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AT-VLA: Adaptive Tactile Injection for Enhanced Feedback Reaction in Vision-Language-Action Models
AT-VLA proposes adaptive tactile injection and a dual-stream tactile reaction mechanism to enhance VLA models for contact-rich robotic manipulation with real-time responses.
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CoRAL: Contact-Rich Adaptive LLM-based Control for Robotic Manipulation
CoRAL lets LLMs act as adaptive cost designers for motion planners while using VLM priors and online identification to handle unknown physics, achieving over 50% higher success rates than baselines in unseen contact-r...
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Modular Sensory Stream for Integrating Physical Feedback in Vision-Language-Action Models
MoSS augments VLAs with decoupled modality streams for multiple physical signals, achieving synergistic gains in real-world robot tasks via joint attention and auxiliary future-signal prediction.
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TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidance
TouchGuide improves contact-rich robot manipulation by steering diffusion or flow-matching visuomotor policies with tactile feasibility scores from a contrastively trained Contact Physical Model.
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Feeling the Unexpected: ResTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Residual Tactile Representation
Residual tactile representations plus surprise-aware gating let VLA policies master contact-rich robot tasks that vision-only models fail.
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$N_0$-TWAM: Scaling Tactile-Native World-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
A scaled tactile-native world-action model jointly predicts vision, touch, and action and outperforms vision-only baselines on contact-rich sim and real robot tasks.
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Representation-Aligned Tactile Grounding for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation
Future tactile prediction applied to intermediate action-expert features, rather than visual-language or final-action features, improves contact-rich manipulation in SmolVLA and π0.
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SoftVTBench: A Safety-Aware Visuo-Tactile Benchmark for Physically Constrained Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects
Success-only metrics overstate deformable-manipulation performance; tactile sensing raises Safety Success (e.g. 21.4%→35.6% on Object-Soft) while Goal Success stays comparable.
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TacGen: Touch Is a Necessary Dimension of Physical-World Representation -- Addressing Tactile Data Scarcity with Scalable Vision-to-Touch Alignment and Generation
TacGen shows that adding synthesized tactile latents to visual representations improves predictions of mass, density, hardness and robotic manipulation performance, supporting touch as a necessary channel for contact-...
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TacGen: Touch Is a Necessary Dimension of Physical-World Representation -- Addressing Tactile Data Scarcity with Scalable Vision-to-Touch Alignment and Generation
TacGen reports that vision-plus-generated-touch representations outperform vision-only models on mass, density, hardness, force, and manipulation tasks, with controls indicating the touch channel accounts for most of ...
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TacForeSight: Force-Guided Tactile World Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation
TacForeSight trains a force-conditioned tactile world model to predict latent dynamics and uses those predictions as anticipatory priors inside a visuo-tactile policy for real-time contact-rich manipulation.
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Dream-Tac: A Unified Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation
Dream-Tac unifies visual and tactile signals in a world action model using contact-gated fusion and attention bias, reporting 31.7% average action accuracy gains on six manipulation tasks.
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AT-VLA: Adaptive Tactile Injection for Enhanced Feedback Reaction in Vision-Language-Action Models
AT-VLA introduces adaptive tactile injection and a dual-stream tactile reaction mechanism to integrate real-time tactile feedback into pretrained VLA models for contact-rich robotic manipulation.
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From Reach to Insert: Tactile-Augmented Precision Assembly under Sub-Millimeter Tolerances
A two-stage IL-RL method with tactile group sampling and a tactile critic achieves 67% success at 0.05 mm clearance while cutting max force by 60% and torque by 44%.
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E-VLA: Event-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Dark and Blurred Scenes
E-VLA integrates event streams directly into VLA models via lightweight fusion, raising Pick-Place success from 0% to 60-90% at 20 lux and from 0% to 20-25% under severe motion blur.
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Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models
Adaptive Action Chunking uses action entropy to dynamically adjust chunk sizes in VLA models, improving performance on simulated and real robotic manipulation tasks.
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Tactile Modality Fusion for Vision-Language-Action Models
A FiLM-based tactile fusion method that conditions VLA visual features on frozen pretrained touch embeddings improves real-robot insertion success, speed, and force control relative to vision-only and concatenation baselines.
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Semantic-Contact Fields for Category-Level Generalizable Tactile Tool Manipulation
SCFields fuses semantics and contact data in a sim-to-real pipeline to enable category-level generalization for tactile tool manipulation with diffusion policies.
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TacWAM: Anchor-Guided World Action Model with Mechanics-Aware Tactile Prediction
Mechanics-aware future tactile prediction plus history and train-time isolation of future tokens raises real-robot contact-rich success from ~37.5% to 75% average.
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Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation
A visuo-tactile policy learning method that exploits tactile motion correlation for contact state distinction and Mixture-of-Transformers for cross-modal fusion.
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TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation
TacCoRL integrates tactile feedback into VLA policies via real-aligned simulation co-training and RL, raising average success from 50% to 72.5% on four bimanual contact-rich tasks with direct real-robot transfer.
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CoRAL: Contact-Rich Adaptive LLM-based Control for Robotic Manipulation
CoRAL lets LLMs design objective functions for robot motion planners and uses vision-language models plus real-time identification to adapt to unknown physical properties, raising success rates by over 50 percent on n...
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Learning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreaming
HTD, a multimodal transformer policy trained with behavioral cloning and touch dreaming to predict future tactile latents, achieves a 90.9% relative success rate improvement over baselines on five real-world contact-r...
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E-VLA: Event-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Dark and Blurred Scenes
Degradation-Driven Prompting improves VLM accuracy on deceptive visual tasks by downsampling inputs and routing them through classification, external visual tools, and a critic.
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HapticVLA: Contact-Rich Manipulation via Vision-Language-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensing
A vision-language-action robot policy that claims tactile-aware manipulation without tactile sensors at inference via reward-weighted flow matching and action distillation.
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Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey
This survey organizes large VLM-based VLA models for robotic manipulation into monolithic and hierarchical paradigms, reviews their integrations and datasets, and outlines future directions.
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Tactile-based Multimodal Fusion in Embodied Intelligence: A Survey of Vision, Language, and Contact-Driven Paradigms
A survey proposing a hierarchical taxonomy for multimodal tactile fusion datasets and methods across perception, generation, and interaction in embodied intelligence.
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RLDX-1 Technical Report
RLDX-1 outperforms frontier VLAs such as π0.5 and GR00T N1.6 on dexterous manipulation benchmarks, reaching 86.8% success on ALLEX humanoid tasks versus around 40% for the baselines.
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RLDX-1 Technical Report
RLDX-1 achieves 86.8% success on complex ALLEX humanoid manipulation tasks where prior VLAs reach only around 40%.
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