Hybrid Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mazzaglia, Pietro, Sancaktar, Cansu, Peschl, Markus, Dijkman, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mazzaglia, Pietro
Sancaktar, Cansu
Peschl, Markus
Dijkman, Daniel
author_facet Mazzaglia, Pietro
Sancaktar, Cansu
Peschl, Markus
Dijkman, Daniel
contents Using Large Language Models to produce intermediate thoughts, a.k.a. Chain-of-thought (CoT), before providing an answer has been a successful recipe for solving complex language tasks. In robotics, similar embodied CoT strategies, generating thoughts before actions, have also been shown to lead to improved performance when using Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs). As these techniques increase the length of the model's generated outputs to include the thoughts, the inference time is negatively affected. Delaying an agent's actions in real-world executions, as in robotic manipulation settings, strongly affects the usability of a method, as tasks require long sequences of actions. However, is the generation of long chains-of-thought a strong prerequisite for achieving performance improvements? In this work, we explore the idea of Hybrid Training (HyT), a framework that enables VLAs to learn from thoughts and benefit from the associated performance gains, while enabling the possibility to leave out CoT generation during inference. Furthermore, by learning to conditionally predict a diverse set of outputs, HyT supports flexibility at inference time, enabling the model to either predict actions directly, generate thoughts or follow instructions. We evaluate the proposed method in a series of simulated benchmarks and real-world experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00600
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Training for Vision-Language-Action Models
Mazzaglia, Pietro
Sancaktar, Cansu
Peschl, Markus
Dijkman, Daniel
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Using Large Language Models to produce intermediate thoughts, a.k.a. Chain-of-thought (CoT), before providing an answer has been a successful recipe for solving complex language tasks. In robotics, similar embodied CoT strategies, generating thoughts before actions, have also been shown to lead to improved performance when using Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs). As these techniques increase the length of the model's generated outputs to include the thoughts, the inference time is negatively affected. Delaying an agent's actions in real-world executions, as in robotic manipulation settings, strongly affects the usability of a method, as tasks require long sequences of actions. However, is the generation of long chains-of-thought a strong prerequisite for achieving performance improvements? In this work, we explore the idea of Hybrid Training (HyT), a framework that enables VLAs to learn from thoughts and benefit from the associated performance gains, while enabling the possibility to leave out CoT generation during inference. Furthermore, by learning to conditionally predict a diverse set of outputs, HyT supports flexibility at inference time, enabling the model to either predict actions directly, generate thoughts or follow instructions. We evaluate the proposed method in a series of simulated benchmarks and real-world experiments.
title Hybrid Training for Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00600