VT-Bridge: Bridging Pretrained Foundation VLAs to VTLAs via Lightweight Residual Adaptation

Abstract:Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) models have demonstrated clear advantages over Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in contact-rich manipulation. However, developing VTLA models is severely constrained by the massive amounts of vision-tactile data and computational resources required. To address this bottleneck, we propose VT-Bridge, a lightweight residual adaptation strategy that bridges pretrained foundation VLAs to VTLAs. Rather than training a VTLA model from scratch or modifying the original architecture of a pretrained VLA, VT-Bridge employs an identical lightweight residual-adapter architecture across VLA backbones and uses backbone-specific weights to refine actions at the robot execution frequency. This design substantially lowers the data and training barriers. Specifically, it requires up to 50 vision-tactile demonstrations per task to fine-tune a VLA backbone and train a 0.98M-parameter residual adapter. Experiments with three representative VLA backbones ($\pi_0$, $\pi_{0.5}$, and SmolVLA) across four contact-rich manipulation tasks further demonstrate its consistent effectiveness across VLA architectures. On average, VT-Bridge raises the task completion rate from 11.7% with task-level VLA fine-tuning alone to 62.9%. Together, these findings demonstrate the broad applicability, effectiveness, and accessibility of VT-Bridge for contact-rich manipulation. The project page is available at this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.22606 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.22606v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22606 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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