Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915982688124928 |
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| author | Ye, Guo Zhang, Zexi Zhao, Xu Wu, Shang Lu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Liu, Han |
| author_facet | Ye, Guo Zhang, Zexi Zhao, Xu Wu, Shang Lu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Liu, Han |
| contents | Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23864 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation Ye, Guo Zhang, Zexi Zhao, Xu Wu, Shang Lu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Liu, Han Robotics Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents. |
| title | Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation |
| topic | Robotics Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23864 |