# ROCKET: Residual-Oriented Multi-Layer Alignment for Spatially-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17951/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D and spatial-aware VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 53 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [3D and spatial-aware VLA](https://mlsanity.com/vla/3d-and-spatial-aware-vla/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08295/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07864/) (2024)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15830/) (2025)
- [RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18088/) (2025)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [Prismatic VLMs: Investigating the Design Space of Visually-Conditioned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07865/) (2024)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17046/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action in Robotics: A Survey of Datasets, Benchmarks, and Data Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23001/) (2026)
- [Drop-Then-Recovery: How Redundant Are Vision-Language-Action Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27755/) (2026)
- [VEGA: Visual Encoder Grounding Alignment for Spatially-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10485/) (2026)
- [VistaVLA: Geometry- and Semantic-Aware 3D Gaussian-Grounded VLA for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12356/) (2026)
- [Decoupling Intention from Trajectory: A Representational Deduction Framework for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06994/) (2026)
- [Temporal Forcing: 4D Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30643/) (2026)
- [FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21228/) (2026)
- [The Layer Mystery of VLA: An Information-Theoretical Analysis of VLA Latent Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36118/) (2026)
- [Staircase Policy: Streaming Inference for World-Action Models with Large Action Chunks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36471/) (2026)
- [MVG-WAM: Multiple View Geometry-Aware World-Action Modeling for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37793/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following robotic manipulation, but they are typically pretrained on 2D data and lack 3D spatial understanding. An effective approach is representation alignment, where a strong vision foundation model is used to guide a 2D VLA model. However, existing methods usually apply supervision at only a single layer, failing to fully exploit the rich information distributed across depth; meanwhile, na"ive multi-layer alignment can cause gradient interference. We introduce ROCKET, a residual-oriented multi-layer representation alignment framework that formulates multi-layer alignment as aligning one residual stream to another. Concretely, ROCKET employs a shared projector to align multiple layers of the VLA backbone with multiple layers of a powerful 3D vision foundation model via a layer-invariant mapping, which reduces gradient conflicts. We provide both theoretical justification and empirical analyses showing that a shared projector is sufficient and outperforms prior designs, and further propose a Matryoshka-style sparse activation scheme for the shared projector to balance multiple alignment losses. Our experiments show that, combined with a training-free layer selection strategy, ROCKET requires only about 4% of the compute budget while achieving 98.5% state-of-the-art success rate on LIBERO. We further demonstrate the superior performance of ROCKET across LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin, as well as multiple VLA models. The code and model weights can be found at https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/ROCKET-VLA.