Learning Affordances at Inference-Time for Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shah, Ameesh, Chen, William, Godbole, Adwait, Mora, Federico, Seshia, Sanjit A., Levine, Sergey
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866918165789802496
author Shah, Ameesh
Chen, William
Godbole, Adwait
Mora, Federico
Seshia, Sanjit A.
Levine, Sergey
author_facet Shah, Ameesh
Chen, William
Godbole, Adwait
Mora, Federico
Seshia, Sanjit A.
Levine, Sergey
contents Solving complex real-world control tasks often takes multiple tries: if we fail at first, we reflect on what went wrong, and change our strategy accordingly to avoid making the same mistake. In robotics, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) offer a promising path towards solving complex control tasks, but lack the ability to contextually and dynamically readjust behavior when they fail to accomplish a task. In this work, we introduce Learning from Inference-Time Execution (LITEN), which connects a VLA low-level policy to a high-level VLM that conditions on past experiences by including them in-context, allowing it to learn the affordances and capabilities of the low-level VLA. Our approach iterates between a reasoning phase that generates and executes plans for the low-level VLA, and an assessment phase that reflects on the resulting execution and draws useful conclusions to be included in future reasoning contexts. Unlike similar approaches to self-refinement in non-robotics domains, LITEN must reflect on unstructured real-world robot trajectories (e.g., raw videos), which requires structured guiderails during assessment. Our experimental results demonstrate LITEN is able to effectively learn from past experience to generate plans that use high-affordance instructions to accomplish long-horizon tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19752
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Affordances at Inference-Time for Vision-Language-Action Models
Shah, Ameesh
Chen, William
Godbole, Adwait
Mora, Federico
Seshia, Sanjit A.
Levine, Sergey
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
I.2.9; I.2.8
Solving complex real-world control tasks often takes multiple tries: if we fail at first, we reflect on what went wrong, and change our strategy accordingly to avoid making the same mistake. In robotics, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) offer a promising path towards solving complex control tasks, but lack the ability to contextually and dynamically readjust behavior when they fail to accomplish a task. In this work, we introduce Learning from Inference-Time Execution (LITEN), which connects a VLA low-level policy to a high-level VLM that conditions on past experiences by including them in-context, allowing it to learn the affordances and capabilities of the low-level VLA. Our approach iterates between a reasoning phase that generates and executes plans for the low-level VLA, and an assessment phase that reflects on the resulting execution and draws useful conclusions to be included in future reasoning contexts. Unlike similar approaches to self-refinement in non-robotics domains, LITEN must reflect on unstructured real-world robot trajectories (e.g., raw videos), which requires structured guiderails during assessment. Our experimental results demonstrate LITEN is able to effectively learn from past experience to generate plans that use high-affordance instructions to accomplish long-horizon tasks.
title Learning Affordances at Inference-Time for Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
I.2.9; I.2.8
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19752