# TempoBridge: Language-Guided Tempo Control for Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09451/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning and chain-of-thought in VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Reasoning and chain-of-thought in VLA](https://mlsanity.com/vla/reasoning-and-chain-of-thought-in-vla/)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are effective at understanding what task to perform, but provide limited control over how it should be executed, such as moving quickly or slowly. We introduce TempoBridge, a lightweight framework that uses frozen VLA representations to modulate actions according to tempo cues in the instruction at each task phase, without additional tempo-conditioned robot demonstrations or tempo-specific base-policy fine-tuning. TempoBridge extracts tempo cues from contextual VLM representations, aligns them with task progress through a causal phase router, and modulates nominal motion commands during execution. Across LIBERO tasks, TempoBridge improves Tempo Success Rate from 52.6% to 89.7% under canonical tempo instructions while retaining high task success. It also preserves near-baseline performance when no tempo cue is present and generalizes to unseen tempo expressions without additional training. Experiments on a physical robot further demonstrate language-conditioned tempo modulation in real-world manipulation.