FlowVLA: Learning Flow-Aware Physical Completion for Quantitative Robotic Pouring

Liwen Yang; Yutian Zhang; Jiaqi Zhai; Li Yang; Tutian Tang; Qiwei Shan; Yancheng Bi; Qiankuan Shangguan; Yangkun Zhu; Ce Hao; Dong Wei; Qiaojun Yu; Dibo Hou

arXiv · 2610.29692

FlowVLA: Learning Flow-Aware Physical Completion for Quantitative Robotic Pouring

Liwen Yang·Yutian Zhang·Jiaqi Zhai·Li Yang·Tutian Tang·Qiwei Shan·Yancheng Bi·Qiankuan Shangguan·Yangkun Zhu·Ce Hao·Dong Wei·Qiaojun Yu·Dibo Hou

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Abstract

During steady pouring, images and robot pose may remain nearly unchanged while transferred mass accumulates, making the return decision ambiguous for a whole-task vision-language-action (VLA) policy. We present FlowVLA, which separates motor generation from physical-completion estimation. A shared $π_{0.5}$ action expert learns approach, pour, and return with boundary-aware supervision. A target-independent estimator fuses visual, joint, wrist-wrench, and recurrent force-belief histories to maintain an estimate of transferred mass. The controller initiates return when this estimate plus predicted residual outflow reaches the requested mass. In coffee-pot/water experiments, FlowVLA achieves 13.1 g goal-balanced mean absolute error (MacroMAE), lower than all tested VLA baselines. Across all attempts, 53.7% both complete the task and finish within +/-10% of the requested mass. The same model interpolates to held-out 150/250-g targets without retraining. Independently trained models further evaluate the formulation in three additional container-fluid settings.

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Liwen Yang, Yutian Zhang, Jiaqi Zhai, Li Yang, Tutian Tang, Qiwei Shan, Yancheng Bi, Qiankuan Shangguan, Yangkun Zhu, Ce Hao, Dong Wei, Qiaojun Yu, Dibo Hou. 2026-10-21. FlowVLA: Learning Flow-Aware Physical Completion for Quantitative Robotic Pouring. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29692

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