# DATAFARM: Distribution-Aligned Task and Motion Planning for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12316 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12316/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Generalist VLA models and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/vla/generalist-vla-models-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10329/) (2024)
- [MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17596/) (2023)
- [Integrated Task and Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01083/) (2020)
- [DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12705/) (2025)
- [Scaling Up and Distilling Down: Language-Guided Robot Skill Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14535/) (2023)
- [A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05331/) (2025)
- [DemoGen: Synthetic Demonstration Generation for Data-Efficient Visuomotor Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16932/) (2025)
- [Imitating Task and Motion Planning with Visuomotor Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16309/) (2023)
- [SkillMimicGen: Automated Demonstration Generation for Efficient Skill Learning and Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18907/) (2024)
- [Real2Render2Real: Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09601/) (2025)
- [Human-in-the-Loop Task and Motion Planning for Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16014/) (2023)
- [Physics-Driven Data Generation for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Trajectory Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20382/) (2025)
- [Guided Imitation of Task and Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03386/) (2021)
- [Should We Learn Contact-Rich Manipulation Policies from Sampling-Based Planners?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09743/) (2024)
- [Planning-Guided Diffusion Policy Learning for Generalizable Contact-Rich Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02676/) (2024)
- [TiPToP: A Modular Open-Vocabulary Robot Manipulation System That Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09971/) (2026)
- [RoboPaint: From Human Demonstration to Any Robot and Any View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05325/) (2026)
- [AOMGen: Photoreal, Physics-Consistent Demonstration Generation for Articulated Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18396/) (2025)
- [DREAM: Deployment-Time Demonstration Generation via Real-to-Sim for Scalable Policy Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29078/) (2026)
- [Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20118/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TANDEM: Task and Motion Planning with As-Needed Demonstrations for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28314/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collecting high-quality robot data remains a fundamental challenge for training robot foundation models. Task and motion planning (TAMP) offers a scalable way to generate demonstrations, but our experiments show that raw TAMP trajectories provide surprisingly little benefit when used to fine-tune pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models, despite successfully solving the target tasks. We hypothesize that this failure arises from a behavioral distribution mismatch between planner-generated trajectories and the data used to pretrain the VLA. To address this mismatch, we introduce DATAFARM: Distribution-Aligned Task And motion planning for Fine-tuning A Robot foundation Model, an approach that incorporates the pretraining distribution directly into TAMP trajectory generation. DATAFARM aligns generated trajectories with the pretraining data in robot joint configurations, motion style, and temporal execution profiles. We evaluate DATAFARM on three tabletop manipulation tasks that TAMP can perform and a cloth-folding task beyond the capability of TAMP. DATAFARM achieves an average success rate of 56.7%, substantially outperforming raw TAMP (8.3%) while approaching human teleoperation (61.7%). On Deformable Object Manipulation, which is outside the fine-tuning distribution, the fine-tuned model retains 85% success, compared with 90% for the pretrained model. These results show that aligning planner-generated demonstrations with the pretraining distribution can make TAMP an effective source of data for VLA fine-tuning. Website and code: https://prpl-group.com/datafarm/