VISTA: Enhancing Visual Conditioning via Track-Following Preference Optimization in Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Yiye, Jian, Yanan, Dong, Xiaoyi, Cao, Shuxin, Wu, Jing, Vela, Patricio, Lundell, Benjamin E., Chen, Dongdong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Chen, Yiye
Jian, Yanan
Dong, Xiaoyi
Cao, Shuxin
Wu, Jing
Vela, Patricio
Lundell, Benjamin E.
Chen, Dongdong
author_facet Chen, Yiye
Jian, Yanan
Dong, Xiaoyi
Cao, Shuxin
Wu, Jing
Vela, Patricio
Lundell, Benjamin E.
Chen, Dongdong
contents Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks. Despite the success, extending large pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to the action space can induce vision-action misalignment, where action predictions exhibit weak dependence on the current visual state, leading to unreliable action outputs. In this work, we study VLA models through the lens of visual conditioning and empirically show that successful rollouts consistently exhibit stronger visual dependence than failed ones. Motivated by this observation, we propose a training framework that explicitly strengthens visual conditioning in VLA models. Our approach first aligns action prediction with visual input via preference optimization on a track-following surrogate task, and then transfers the enhanced alignment to instruction-following task through latent-space distillation during supervised finetuning. Without introducing architectural modifications or additional data collection, our method improves both visual conditioning and task performance for discrete OpenVLA, and further yields consistent gains when extended to the continuous OpenVLA-OFT setting. Project website: https://vista-vla.github.io/ .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_05049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VISTA: Enhancing Visual Conditioning via Track-Following Preference Optimization in Vision-Language-Action Models
Chen, Yiye
Jian, Yanan
Dong, Xiaoyi
Cao, Shuxin
Wu, Jing
Vela, Patricio
Lundell, Benjamin E.
Chen, Dongdong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks. Despite the success, extending large pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to the action space can induce vision-action misalignment, where action predictions exhibit weak dependence on the current visual state, leading to unreliable action outputs. In this work, we study VLA models through the lens of visual conditioning and empirically show that successful rollouts consistently exhibit stronger visual dependence than failed ones. Motivated by this observation, we propose a training framework that explicitly strengthens visual conditioning in VLA models. Our approach first aligns action prediction with visual input via preference optimization on a track-following surrogate task, and then transfers the enhanced alignment to instruction-following task through latent-space distillation during supervised finetuning. Without introducing architectural modifications or additional data collection, our method improves both visual conditioning and task performance for discrete OpenVLA, and further yields consistent gains when extended to the continuous OpenVLA-OFT setting. Project website: https://vista-vla.github.io/ .
title VISTA: Enhancing Visual Conditioning via Track-Following Preference Optimization in Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05049