mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

arXiv 2604.21391 ↗First posted 23 Apr 2026cs.RO cs.AIcited by 3

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Generalist VLA models and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Generalist VLA models and benchmarks, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 49 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

Builds on

49 of 55 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model11 Sep
  2. 2025Unified Vision-Language-Action Model24 Jun
  3. 2025VLA-OS: Structuring and Dissecting Planning Representations and Paradigms in Vision-Language-Action Models21 Jun
  4. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics2 Jun
  5. 2025NORA: A Small Open-Sourced Generalist Vision Language Action Model for Embodied Tasks28 Apr
  6. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization22 Apr
  7. 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success27 Feb
  8. 2024CogACT: A Foundational Vision-Language-Action Model for Synergizing Cognition and Action in Robotic Manipulation29 Nov
  9. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model13 Jun

Other references · 40

  1. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  2. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,838
  3. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,568
  4. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,484
  5. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
  6. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
  7. 2023Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Modelscited by 862
  8. 2021Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge with Applications to Score-Based Generative Modelingcited by 602
  9. 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 519
  10. 2022Is Conditional Generative Modeling all you need for Decision-Making?cited by 516
  11. 2024Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulationcited by 495
  12. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 451
28 more
  1. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 410
  2. 2025WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Modelcited by 367
  3. 2024TraceVLA: Visual Trace Prompting Enhances Spatial-Temporal Awareness for Generalist Robotic Policiescited by 304
  4. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 303
  5. 2018Residual Reinforcement Learning for Robot Controlcited by 274
  6. 2025MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Spacecited by 197
  7. 2025VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 176
  8. 2018Residual Policy Learningcited by 164
  9. 2025ThinkAct: Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Reinforced Visual Latent Planningcited by 156
  10. 2018Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Taskscited by 154
  11. 2025Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agentscited by 139
  12. 2025Interactive Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 135
  13. 2025GraspVLA: a Grasping Foundation Model Pre-trained on Billion-scale Synthetic Action Datacited by 123
  14. 2024GRAPE: Generalizing Robot Policy via Preference Alignmentcited by 109
  15. 2025PD-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Model Integrated with Action Chunking via Parallel Decodingcited by 88
  16. 20254D-VLA: Spatiotemporal Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Cross-Scene Calibrationcited by 56
  17. 2025FlowVLA: Visual Chain of Thought-based Motion Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 50
  18. 2015Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation Skills with Guided Policy Searchcited by 38
  19. 2025Much Ado About Noising: Dispelling the Myths of Generative Robotic Controlcited by 36
  20. 2022Don't Start From Scratch: Leveraging Prior Data to Automate Robotic Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
  21. 2025Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Modelscited by 25
  22. 2025VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policycited by 25
  23. 2025H3DP: Triply-Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Visuomotor Learningcited by 16
  24. 2025FlowMP: Learning Motion Fields for Robot Planning with Conditional Flow Matchingcited by 15
  25. 2025Residual Diffusion Bridge Model for Image Restorationcited by 15
  26. 2025Conditioning Matters: Training Diffusion Policies is Faster Than You Thinkcited by 9
  27. 2025FreqPolicy: Frequency Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy with Continuous Tokenscited by 9
  28. 2025CAR-Flow: Condition-Aware Reparameterization Aligns Source and Target for Better Flow Matchingcited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026PhysVLA: Towards Physically-Grounded VLA for Embodied Robotic Manipulation
  2. 2026Libra-VLA: Achieving Learning Equilibrium via Asynchronous Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System
  3. 2025Towards Deploying VLA without Fine-Tuning: Plug-and-Play Inference-Time VLA Policy Steering via Embodied Evolutionary Diffusion
  4. 2026Anticipation-VLA: Solving Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks via Anticipation-based Subgoal Generation
  5. 2026EmbodiedSkills: A Unified Framework for Orchestrating, Training, and Deploying VLA Agents
  6. 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Experts
  7. 2025LoHoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks
  8. 2026Semantic Anchoring for Robotic Action Representations