$Δ$VLA: Prior-Guided Vision-Language-Action Models via World Knowledge Variation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Yijie, He, Jie, Shao, Rui, Yuan, Kaishen, Tan, Tao, Yuan, Xiaochen, Yu, Zitong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhu, Yijie
He, Jie
Shao, Rui
Yuan, Kaishen
Tan, Tao
Yuan, Xiaochen
Yu, Zitong
author_facet Zhu, Yijie
He, Jie
Shao, Rui
Yuan, Kaishen
Tan, Tao
Yuan, Xiaochen
Yu, Zitong
contents Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly advanced robotic manipulation by unifying perception, reasoning, and control. To achieve such integration, recent studies adopt a predictive paradigm that models future visual states or world knowledge to guide action generation. However, these models emphasize forecasting outcomes rather than reasoning about the underlying process of change, which is essential for determining how to act. To address this, we propose $Δ$VLA, a prior-guided framework that models world-knowledge variations relative to an explicit current-world knowledge prior for action generation, rather than regressing absolute future world states. Specifically, 1) to construct the current world knowledge prior, we propose the Prior-Guided WorldKnowledge Extractor (PWKE). It extracts manipulable regions, spatial relations, and semantic cues from the visual input, guided by auxiliary heads and prior pseudo labels, thus reducing redundancy. 2) Building upon this, to represent how world knowledge evolves under actions, we introduce the Latent World Variation Quantization (LWVQ). It learns a discrete latent space via a VQ-VAE objective to encode world knowledge variations, shifting prediction from full modalities to compact latent. 3)Moreover, to mitigate interference during variation modeling, we design the Conditional Variation Attention (CV-Atten), whichpromotes disentangled learning and preserves the independence of knowledge representations. Extensive experiments on both simulated benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate $Δ$VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving efficiency. Code and real-world execution videos are available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/DeltaVLA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08361
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle $Δ$VLA: Prior-Guided Vision-Language-Action Models via World Knowledge Variation
Zhu, Yijie
He, Jie
Shao, Rui
Yuan, Kaishen
Tan, Tao
Yuan, Xiaochen
Yu, Zitong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly advanced robotic manipulation by unifying perception, reasoning, and control. To achieve such integration, recent studies adopt a predictive paradigm that models future visual states or world knowledge to guide action generation. However, these models emphasize forecasting outcomes rather than reasoning about the underlying process of change, which is essential for determining how to act. To address this, we propose $Δ$VLA, a prior-guided framework that models world-knowledge variations relative to an explicit current-world knowledge prior for action generation, rather than regressing absolute future world states. Specifically, 1) to construct the current world knowledge prior, we propose the Prior-Guided WorldKnowledge Extractor (PWKE). It extracts manipulable regions, spatial relations, and semantic cues from the visual input, guided by auxiliary heads and prior pseudo labels, thus reducing redundancy. 2) Building upon this, to represent how world knowledge evolves under actions, we introduce the Latent World Variation Quantization (LWVQ). It learns a discrete latent space via a VQ-VAE objective to encode world knowledge variations, shifting prediction from full modalities to compact latent. 3)Moreover, to mitigate interference during variation modeling, we design the Conditional Variation Attention (CV-Atten), whichpromotes disentangled learning and preserves the independence of knowledge representations. Extensive experiments on both simulated benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate $Δ$VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving efficiency. Code and real-world execution videos are available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/DeltaVLA.
title $Δ$VLA: Prior-Guided Vision-Language-Action Models via World Knowledge Variation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08361