3D CAVLA: Leveraging Depth and 3D Context to Generalize Vision Language Action Models for Unseen Tasks

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Main Authors: Bhat, Vineet, Lan, Yu-Hsiang, Krishnamurthy, Prashanth, Karri, Ramesh, Khorrami, Farshad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bhat, Vineet
Lan, Yu-Hsiang
Krishnamurthy, Prashanth
Karri, Ramesh
Khorrami, Farshad
author_facet Bhat, Vineet
Lan, Yu-Hsiang
Krishnamurthy, Prashanth
Karri, Ramesh
Khorrami, Farshad
contents Robotic manipulation in 3D requires effective computation of N degree-of-freedom joint-space trajectories that enable precise and robust control. To achieve this, robots must integrate semantic understanding with visual perception to transform real-world observations into low-level control for object interaction. Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise by mapping RGB images and language instructions to task space velocities, typically trained on large datasets of teleoperated demonstrations. However, these models often struggle with generalization beyond their training distributions. In this work, we introduce 3D-CAVLA, a novel finetuning framework that enhances task generalization of VLA policies by incorporating three key components: (i) chain-of-thought reasoning for structured decision-making, (ii) depth-aware perception for 3D spatial understanding, and (iii) task-oriented region-of-interest detection for focused manipulation. Extensive experiments in the LIBERO simulation environment demonstrate that 3D-CAVLA achieves an average success rate of 98.1% across diverse in-domain task suites. On unseen tasks, 3D-CAVLA delivers an absolute improvement of 8.8% in success rate, underscoring the benefits of 3D scene awareness for robust generalization. We validate our approach on real-world tabletop experiments demonstrating that the proposed model translates effectively from simulation to physical robots. 3D-CAVLA achieves over a 3X faster training convergence and delivers a 25% gain in success rate on unseen real world tasks. We will open-source our code and the unseen tasks dataset to promote community-driven research here: https://3d-cavla.github.io
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05800
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 3D CAVLA: Leveraging Depth and 3D Context to Generalize Vision Language Action Models for Unseen Tasks
Bhat, Vineet
Lan, Yu-Hsiang
Krishnamurthy, Prashanth
Karri, Ramesh
Khorrami, Farshad
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotic manipulation in 3D requires effective computation of N degree-of-freedom joint-space trajectories that enable precise and robust control. To achieve this, robots must integrate semantic understanding with visual perception to transform real-world observations into low-level control for object interaction. Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise by mapping RGB images and language instructions to task space velocities, typically trained on large datasets of teleoperated demonstrations. However, these models often struggle with generalization beyond their training distributions. In this work, we introduce 3D-CAVLA, a novel finetuning framework that enhances task generalization of VLA policies by incorporating three key components: (i) chain-of-thought reasoning for structured decision-making, (ii) depth-aware perception for 3D spatial understanding, and (iii) task-oriented region-of-interest detection for focused manipulation. Extensive experiments in the LIBERO simulation environment demonstrate that 3D-CAVLA achieves an average success rate of 98.1% across diverse in-domain task suites. On unseen tasks, 3D-CAVLA delivers an absolute improvement of 8.8% in success rate, underscoring the benefits of 3D scene awareness for robust generalization. We validate our approach on real-world tabletop experiments demonstrating that the proposed model translates effectively from simulation to physical robots. 3D-CAVLA achieves over a 3X faster training convergence and delivers a 25% gain in success rate on unseen real world tasks. We will open-source our code and the unseen tasks dataset to promote community-driven research here: https://3d-cavla.github.io
title 3D CAVLA: Leveraging Depth and 3D Context to Generalize Vision Language Action Models for Unseen Tasks
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05800