Beyond World-Frame Action Heads: Motion-Centric Action Frames for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly with stronger backbones, broader pre-training, and larger demonstration datasets, yet their action heads remain largely homogeneous: most directly predict action commands in a fixed world coordinate frame. We propose MCF-Proto, a lightweight action head that equips VLA policies with a Motion-Centric Action Frame (MCF) and a prototype-based action parameterization. At each step, the policy predicts a rotation Rt ∈ SO(3), composes actions in the transformed local frame from a set of prototypes, and maps them back to the world frame for end-to-end training, using only standard demonstrations without auxiliary supervision. This simple design induces stable emergent structure. Without explicit directional labels, the learned local frames develop a stable geometric structure whose axes are strongly compatible with demonstrated end-effector motion. Meanwhile, actions in the learned representation become substantially more compact, with variation captured by fewer dominant directions and more regularly organized by shared prototypes. These structural properties translate into improved robustness, especially under geometric perturbations. Our results suggest that adding lightweight geometric and compositional structure to the action head can materially improve how VLA policies organize and generalize robotic manipulation behavior. An anonymized code repository is provided in the supplementary material.