Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.36285

ASPEN: Adaptive Semantic Reasoning via Command Persistence Prediction for Efficient Navigation VLAs

Vieri N. Akustia·Bin Hu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Navigation vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly invoke costly semantic reasoning even when the next command remains unchanged. Command reuse can reduce computation but risks missing instruction-dependent turns or stops. We introduce ASPEN, an event-triggered scheduler based on command persistence prediction: estimating whether the frozen base policy would reissue its previous command. A lightweight multimodal predictor combines temporal observations, language instructions, execution history, and cached VLA confidence. At eligible command boundaries, sufficient predicted persistence permits command reuse. Otherwise, ASPEN triggers fresh semantic reasoning from the VLA. Evaluated with frozen NaVILA on cross-dataset RxR-CE val-unseen, ASPEN reduces VLA calls by 9.5% and estimated inference time by 8.1%, including scheduling overhead. It maintains comparable navigation performance and preserves identical baseline action sequences on 92.1% of episodes.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Vieri N. Akustia, Bin Hu. 2026-10-26. ASPEN: Adaptive Semantic Reasoning via Command Persistence Prediction for Efficient Navigation VLAs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36285

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution: A Closed Two-Stage Framework for Precise and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

In robotic manipulation, the tight coupling between grasping and motion planning often obscures the true source of failure, leading to inefficient trial-and-error. To enable efficient long-horizon manipulation, we propose GTP-FA (Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution), a task-oriented two-stage 'grasp-then-plan' framework that generates grasp candidates and performs downstream motion planning conditioned on the selected grasp. Given a failed manipulation trajectory, we learn a failure attribution model that generalizes to unseen grasps and produces a stable distribution over failure modes for diagnosis-guided optimization. Based on these attribution results, we then optimize both modules in a diagnosis-driven manner: on the grasping side, we inject task-level priors and risk penalties into grasp candidate scoring and optimization to suppress unstable or task-incompatible grasps; on the planning side, we target high-risk initial states through data collection and fine-tuning to address genuine planning bottlenecks. We evaluate the proposed framework in both simulation and real-robot experiments, and show that GTP-FA improves the corresponding base learners across RL, IL, diffusion-policy, and VLA-based settings, achieving substantially higher overall task success rates.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation

Force signals provide critical interaction cues for contact-rich robotic manipulation. However, existing methods mostly use force as an additional observation modality, without fully exploiting its role in modeling future interaction dynamics or guiding execution-time feedback correction. In this paper, we propose FAWAM, a force-aware world action model that incorporates force information at three levels: perception, prediction, and closed-loop execution. FAWAM first encodes historical 6-axis force/torque signals to modulate action generation, then jointly predicts future actions and end-effector wrenches to explicitly model contact evolution. It further introduces a residual correction module that uses the predicted wrench trajectory as an execution-time reference to refine actions online based on real-time force feedback. Real-world experiments across multiple contact-rich tasks show that FAWAM improves the average success rate by 36.25% over vision-only baselines and 21.25% over existing force-aware baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our force-aware framework for robust contact-rich manipulation.

cs.RO↗