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PointVLA: Injecting the 3D World into Vision-Language-Action Models
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PointVLA: Injecting the 3D World into Vision-Language-Action Models
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Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks--minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, Unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table height that unseen in train data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.
Forward citations
Cited by 23 Pith papers
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Look Where It Matters: Adaptive Visual Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models
Inserting register tokens into a VLA encoder plus uncertainty-gated, attention-guided cropping raises π0's success from 94.2% to 98.4% on LIBERO and 46.5% to 69.0% on a real-world benchmark, at 1.4–1.6× compute.
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ConsisVLA-4D: Advancing Spatiotemporal Consistency in Efficient 3D-Perception and 4D-Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation
ConsisVLA-4D adds cross-view semantic alignment, cross-object geometric fusion, and cross-scene dynamic reasoning to VLA models, delivering 21.6% and 41.5% gains plus 2.3x and 2.4x speedups on LIBERO and real-world tasks.
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ST-$\pi$: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation
ST-π structures VLA models by having a spatiotemporal VLM produce causally ordered chunk-level prompts that guide a dual-generator action expert to jointly handle spatial and temporal control in robotic manipulation.
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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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VLA Knows Its Limits: Adaptive Execution Horizons for Robot Policies
AutoHorizon estimates per-chunk execution horizons in flow-based VLA policies from action self-attention plateau positions, beating fixed-horizon tuning in most tested benchmarks.
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Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation
DreamTacVLA grounds VLA models in contact physics by aligning multi-scale vision-tactile inputs and predicting future tactile states, reaching up to 95% success on contact-rich tasks.
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Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation
A vision-language-action policy that predicts future tactile images and uses that predicted touch to refine its actions reaches up to 95% success on contact-rich manipulation.
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StereoVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Stereo Vision
A vision-language-action model that fuses stereo-derived geometric features with semantic features improves real-world grasping success and camera-pose robustness over single-view baselines.
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Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy
BAC accelerates transformer-based Diffusion Policy up to 3x by block-level adaptive feature caching using an Adaptive Caching Scheduler and Bubbling Union Algorithm to control error propagation.
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VistaVLA: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware 3D Gaussian-Grounded VLA for Robotic Manipulation
VistaVLA lifts multi-view vision-language features into 3D Gaussians, compresses them 99% via Merge-then-Query, and improves real-robot manipulation success by ~23% over baselines.
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VistaVLA: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware 3D Gaussian-Grounded VLA for Robotic Manipulation
VistaVLA lifts 2D semantic features into 3D Gaussians and compresses them to 64 tokens, improving robot manipulation success by 22.8% over a 2D VLA baseline in real-world tasks.
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GeoHAT: Geometry-Adaptive Hybrid Action Transformer for Mobile Manipulation
GeoHAT reports a 79.3% mean success rate on the ManiSkill-HAB mobile manipulation benchmark (23.7% above the strongest baseline) by using gated geometric token injection and a hybrid whole-body action decoder.
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World Pilot: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models with World-Action Priors
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.
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OASIS: Observation-Action Space Alignment via SE(3) Trajectory Prediction for Robotic Manipulation
OASIS improves robotic manipulation success and generalization by predicting camera-frame SE(3) end-effector trajectories to condition the action decoder on pose-supervised states.
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From Abstraction to Instantiation: Learning Behavioral Representation for Vision-Language-Action Model
BehaviorVLA introduces a symmetric encoder-decoder architecture with causal Mamba and phase conditioning to learn unified long-horizon behavioral representations for improved generalization in VLA models.
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X-Imitator: Spatial-Aware Imitation Learning via Bidirectional Action-Pose Interaction
X-Imitator is a bidirectional action-pose interaction framework for spatial-aware imitation learning that outperforms vanilla policies and explicit pose guidance on 24 simulated and 3 real-world robotic tasks.
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PokeVLA: Empowering Pocket-Sized Vision-Language-Action Model with Comprehensive World Knowledge Guidance
PokeVLA is a lightweight VLA model pre-trained on 2.4M samples for spatial grounding and reasoning, then adapted via multi-view semantics and geometry alignment to achieve state-of-the-art robot manipulation performance.
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R3D: Revisiting 3D Policy Learning
A transformer 3D encoder plus diffusion decoder architecture, with 3D-specific augmentations, outperforms prior 3D policy methods on manipulation benchmarks by improving training stability.
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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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QDepth-VLA: Quantized Depth Prediction as Auxiliary Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models
Adding an auxiliary quantized-depth-token prediction task to a VLA policy improves manipulation success rates on LIBERO, Simpler, and real-robot pick-and-place tasks versus the open-pi-zero baseline.
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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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From Abstraction to Instantiation: Learning Behavioral Representation for Vision-Language-Action Model
BehaviorVLA learns long-horizon behavioral representations via causal Mamba encoder and phase-conditioned decoder, reporting SOTA results of 58% on RoboTwin 2.0, 98% on LIBERO, 4.36 on CALVIN, and matching OpenVLA-OFT...
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Understanding the Impact of Geometric Foundation Models on Vision-Language-Action Models
The paper quantifies the geometric gap in current VLAs via linear probing and compares three architectures for injecting geometry from GFMs while analyzing impacts of data, cameras, and reconstruction quality.
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