# Axiom-0: Hierarchical Self-Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14155/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generalist VLA models and benchmarks, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 10 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 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, 10 of 10)

- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15830/) (2025)
- [LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13626/) (2025)
- [Looped Transformers are Better at Learning Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12424/) (2023)
- [Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12276/) (2025)
- [RoboCasa365: A Large-Scale Simulation Framework for Training and Benchmarking Generalist Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04356/) (2026)
- [Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with over 100K Hours of Real-World Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15330/) (2026)
- [From Spatial to Actions: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Model in Spatial Foundation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17439/) (2025)
- [LIBERO-Safety: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Physical and Semantic Safety in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23686/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable manipulation requires policies that generalize across tasks, layouts, and object interactions. Vision-language-action (VLA) models combine pretrained multimodal understanding with learned control, but their performance remains limited on unfamiliar task compositions. We present Axiom-0, a VLA policy that addresses both the quality of its representations and their use in action generation through hierarchical self-refinement. Intra-VLM Representation Refinement (IVRR) strengthens selected intermediate features through consistency supervision with learned feature projections during training. VLM-Action Interface Refinement (VAIR) recursively updates the resulting conditioning before action generation. Joint optimization of the supervised VLM layers, VAIR, and the action generator connects the two components. On RoboCasa365, Axiom-0 achieves 62.32% overall success in our evaluation, exceeding the highest published leaderboard score (Paimon-0, 58.1%) by 4.22 percentage points and the Xiaomi-Robotics-1 reference by 4.92 points. Under the evaluated profiling setup, mean action-chunk generation latency increases by 1.7% over Xiaomi-Robotics-1. These results demonstrate improved task completion with modest inference overhead.