Listen Before Act: Audio-Conditioned Robot Manipulation with ListenVLA

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by connecting visual perception and language instructions to action generation. However, many manipulation tasks depend on auditory cues that cannot be reliably inferred from visual observations and may need to be elicited through physical interaction. To address this gap, we present ListenVLA, an audio-conditioned VLA policy built on GR00T N1.7 for sound-guided manipulation. ListenVLA combines semantic audio embeddings with waveform-derived acoustic cues over a causal audio history and conditions continuous action generation through audio tokens and feature modulation. Moreover, we introduce an audio-action binding objective that uses context-matched demonstrations to link auditory differences to demonstrated action differences. The objective supervises short-horizon differences between flow-velocity predictions under different audio conditions, with shared pure-noise action inputs and fixed non-audio observations, alongside full-chunk action supervision. Furthermore, we develop LIBERO-Audio, an eight-task benchmark covering sound-based target selection, responses to auditory events, and physical interactions that reveal acoustic evidence. Experiments on LIBERO-Audio and three real-world manipulation tasks show excellent performance. Ablation studies support the contributions of binding supervision and audio modulation, while audio swap tests show that sound influences action predictions. Our code and videos are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/listenvla-F18D