AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hu, Yutong, Zaech, Jan-Nico, Nikolov, Nikolay, Yao, Yuanqi, Dey, Sombit, Albanese, Giuliano, Detry, Renaud, Van Gool, Luc, Paudel, Danda
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Hu, Yutong
Zaech, Jan-Nico
Nikolov, Nikolay
Yao, Yuanqi
Dey, Sombit
Albanese, Giuliano
Detry, Renaud
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda
author_facet Hu, Yutong
Zaech, Jan-Nico
Nikolov, Nikolay
Yao, Yuanqi
Dey, Sombit
Albanese, Giuliano
Detry, Renaud
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda
contents We propose a standalone autoregressive (AR) Action Expert that generates actions as a continuous causal sequence while conditioning on refreshable vision-language prefixes. In contrast to existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and diffusion policies that reset temporal context with each new observation and predict actions reactively, our Action Expert maintains its own history through a long-lived memory and is inherently context-aware. This structure addresses the frequency mismatch between fast control and slow reasoning, enabling efficient independent pretraining of kinematic syntax and modular integration with heavy perception backbones, naturally ensuring spatio-temporally consistent action generation across frames. To synchronize these asynchronous hybrid V-L-A modalities, we utilize a re-anchoring mechanism that mathematically accounts for perception staleness during both training and inference. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively replace traditional chunk-based action heads for both specialist and generalist policies. AR-VLA exhibits superior history awareness and substantially smoother action trajectories while maintaining or exceeding the task success rates of state-of-the-art reactive VLAs. Overall, our work introduces a scalable, context-aware action generation schema that provides a robust structural foundation for training effective robotic policies. Code and Videos available at https://arvla.insait.ai
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models
Hu, Yutong
Zaech, Jan-Nico
Nikolov, Nikolay
Yao, Yuanqi
Dey, Sombit
Albanese, Giuliano
Detry, Renaud
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
We propose a standalone autoregressive (AR) Action Expert that generates actions as a continuous causal sequence while conditioning on refreshable vision-language prefixes. In contrast to existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and diffusion policies that reset temporal context with each new observation and predict actions reactively, our Action Expert maintains its own history through a long-lived memory and is inherently context-aware. This structure addresses the frequency mismatch between fast control and slow reasoning, enabling efficient independent pretraining of kinematic syntax and modular integration with heavy perception backbones, naturally ensuring spatio-temporally consistent action generation across frames. To synchronize these asynchronous hybrid V-L-A modalities, we utilize a re-anchoring mechanism that mathematically accounts for perception staleness during both training and inference. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively replace traditional chunk-based action heads for both specialist and generalist policies. AR-VLA exhibits superior history awareness and substantially smoother action trajectories while maintaining or exceeding the task success rates of state-of-the-art reactive VLAs. Overall, our work introduces a scalable, context-aware action generation schema that provides a robust structural foundation for training effective robotic policies. Code and Videos available at https://arvla.insait.ai
title AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10126