τ: Learning Touch-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models from Future Visual Supervision

Incorporating tactile sensing into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models holds promise for contact-rich manipulation, where visual observations alone often fail to capture critical cues about physical interactions. However, learning informative tactile representation while effectively adapting it to pretrained VLA models remains challenging under limited task-specific data. Existing methods either focus on instantaneous contact states or model temporal interaction dynamics using 6D wrench sequences, leaving high-dimensional tactile signals underexplored. To address these challenges, we present τ, a touch-augmented VLA framework that learns an action-conditioned spatiotemporal tactile representation from future visual supervision inspired by the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), and fuses it with vision-language features for action generation. This supervision operates in latent space and is used only during training, adding no deployment overhead. We also introduce TacAura, a dataset of synchronized vision, proprioception, and vision-based tactile signals across four representative contact-rich manipulation tasks. Experiments show that τ outperforms existing models and generalizes to unseen objects and scenes, delivering improved manipulation performance and robustness. Project Page: https://cocacola-lab.github.io/tau-Page/.