World-Calibrated Proposal-to-Action Flow for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract:Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies generate action chunks by transporting samples from a task-agnostic isotropic Gaussian source. As this source is conditioned on neither recent execution nor predicted future evolution, (i) it discards the local continuity established by recently executed motion. (ii) Even when predictive world representations are introduced, they often only condition the transport dynamics rather than determine where generation starts, how far it may deviate, or along which action directions it may expand. Building on this observation, we introduce ProAct, a world-calibrated proposal-to-action framework that makes the generative source itself predictable. (i) To preserve motion continuity, a lightweight Proposal Expert converts recent actions into a scene-aware hypothesis via one motion-anchored endpoint flow-matching step, initializing generation near the demonstrated action manifold. (ii) To jointly capture intended scene evolution and proposal-future compatibility, a prospective World Expert treats the hypothesis as a soft motion prior while predicting the task-consistent latent future. (iii) From this compatibility, the model calibrates a proposal-centered anisotropic source, where a bounded per-step extent controls the allowed deviation and a trace-normalized low-rank geometry under a condition-number budget allocates refinement over coupled translation, rotation, and gripper directions. Compared with $\pi_{0.5}$, ProAct improves performance across simulation and real-world tasks while reducing denoising steps by 50%, inference latency by up to 25.8%, and increasing throughput by up to 34.8%.

25 pages, 10 figures. Project page: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2610.02323 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.02323v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02323 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.