Flow-Support-Weighted Proposals for Test-Time Verified VLA Policies
cs.RO, cs.CV
Submitted: 2026-10-10
Updated: 2026-10-10
Comments: 35 pages, 5 figures, under review in AAAI 2027
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Test-time sampling promises to turn one action prediction into a set of distinct executable candidates that a verifier can choose among.
Abstract
Test-time sampling promises to turn one action prediction into a set of distinct executable candidates that a verifier can choose among. Downstream fine-tuning works against that promise. A vision-language-action model trained to solve one task distribution concentrates its flow-matching decoder around the dominant demonstrated action, so repeated samples differ only marginally and the verifier receives many copies of one decision. We call this proposal contraction and identify it as a key constraint on test-time scaling: repeated samples can remain highly redundant as the candidate budget grows. Action Dynamic Sampling (ADS) alleviates the constraint on the proposal side, during training. At each training step, ADS integrates K additional trajectories from the current policy under fresh base noise, scores each by the flow support along its path with a Hutchinson trace estimator, and corrects the policy's local action distribution toward this weighted set through a detached finite-set KL term. Training cost rises; deployment cost is unchanged. Across simulation and four physical-robot tasks, ADS raises proposal spread without the success penalty that Gaussian perturbation incurs, lifts oracle best-of-8 success on RoboCasa from 57.6% to 63.0%, improves fixed verifiers by 2.4 to 4.9 points in simulation, and raises TokenPB by up to 13.0 points on real-world manipulation.
Sources
- EVE: A Generator-Verifier System for Generative Policies
- EVOLVE-VLA: Test-Time Training from Environment Feedback for Vision-Language-Action Models
- MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution
- $\pi_0$: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control
- RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
- Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion
- RoVer: Robot Reward Model as Test-Time Verifier for Vision-Language-Action Model
- Sample, Don't Search: Rethinking Test-Time Alignment for Language Models
- LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models
- Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision-Language-Action Models
- LIBERO-Para: A Diagnostic Benchmark and Metrics for Paraphrase Robustness in VLA Models
- RoboMonkey: Scaling Test-Time Sampling and Verification for Vision-Language-Action Models
- Scaling Verification Can Be More Effective than Scaling Policy Learning for Vision-Language-Action Alignment
- Training Vision-Language-Action Models with Dense Embodied Chain-of-Thought Supervision
- Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation
- HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model
- RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots
- GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
- Unleashing More Actions via Action Compositional Training for VLA Models
- StarVLA: A Lego-like Codebase for Vision-Language-Action Model Developing
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