PRISM: Primitive Routing via In-context Skill Mixing for Retentive VLA Adaptation

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise a single language-conditioned policy adaptable to many manipulation behaviors, yet deployment additionally requires skill retention and long-horizon composition: a policy must retain previously acquired skills and reuse them inside composite tasks whose behavior changes across phases. The standard recipe absorbs every new task into one shared update, which provides neither a parameter-level locus for reusable skills nor a mechanism for invoking each skill along the trajectory. We observe that this missing structure is latent rather than absent: per-skill low-rank updates of a pretrained VLA occupy a robustly distinguishable, low-dimensional subspace, and a single composite-task LoRA concentrates roughly half of its Frobenius energy in this subspace, against a near-zero matched random-rotation control. Building on this geometry, we introduce PRISM, which represents reusable skills as parameter-level primitives: each skill family is stored as a dedicated low-rank action-expert adapter in a primitive bank, primitives are augmented with skill-specific low-rank residuals and composed at inference by a per-chunk VLM-conditioned router that reads the prefix representation to track task progress, and the router is supervised by per-chunk labels from a deterministic, task-conditioned, action-derived oracle. During composite training, the vision encoder, the language LoRA, the skill residuals, the router, and the shared action projections and time MLP are updated; every primitive is held frozen, so the base per-skill action-expert adapters are preserved by construction. On RoboCasa365, PRISM achieves 56.43% atomic-skill success and reaches 20.00% on long-horizon composite tasks, while a standard $π_{0.5}$-LoRA two-stage fine-tune reaches 17.86% atomic and 17.50% composite success. We additionally validate PRISM on an AgileX PIPER real-robot setup.