Can Explicit Physical Feasibility Benefit VLA Learning? An Empirical Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wei, Yubai, Wu, Chen, Haghbayan, Hashem
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Wei, Yubai
Wu, Chen
Haghbayan, Hashem
author_facet Wei, Yubai
Wu, Chen
Haghbayan, Hashem
contents Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal inputs directly to robot actions and are typically trained through large-scale imitation learning. While this paradigm has shown strong performance, prevailing VLA training procedures do not explicitly supervise hard physical constraints such as obstacle avoidance or kinematic feasibility. As a result, the geometric structure underlying physically feasible behavior must be inferred only implicitly from demonstrations. In this paper, we study whether introducing explicit feasibility supervision can provide effective structured guidance for VLA policies. We formulate a simple geometry-grounded feasibility objective and integrate it into the training stage of a diffusion-based VLA policy. To evaluate this idea systematically, we use obstacle-aware manipulation as a controlled probe of geometry-dependent physical feasibility. Empirical results show that augmenting VLA training with feasibility supervision improves both physical reliability and overall task performance, while also enhancing learning efficiency in the low-data regime. These findings indicate that explicit feasibility signals can effectively complement imitation-based VLA learning, highlighting their potential for developing more reliable VLA policies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17896
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Explicit Physical Feasibility Benefit VLA Learning? An Empirical Study
Wei, Yubai
Wu, Chen
Haghbayan, Hashem
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal inputs directly to robot actions and are typically trained through large-scale imitation learning. While this paradigm has shown strong performance, prevailing VLA training procedures do not explicitly supervise hard physical constraints such as obstacle avoidance or kinematic feasibility. As a result, the geometric structure underlying physically feasible behavior must be inferred only implicitly from demonstrations. In this paper, we study whether introducing explicit feasibility supervision can provide effective structured guidance for VLA policies. We formulate a simple geometry-grounded feasibility objective and integrate it into the training stage of a diffusion-based VLA policy. To evaluate this idea systematically, we use obstacle-aware manipulation as a controlled probe of geometry-dependent physical feasibility. Empirical results show that augmenting VLA training with feasibility supervision improves both physical reliability and overall task performance, while also enhancing learning efficiency in the low-data regime. These findings indicate that explicit feasibility signals can effectively complement imitation-based VLA learning, highlighting their potential for developing more reliable VLA policies.
title Can Explicit Physical Feasibility Benefit VLA Learning? An Empirical Study
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17896