Latent Cluster Analysis for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models are increasingly used in robotics for their ability to ground language and perception into action, yet the internal representations driving their behaviour remain poorly understood. We propose LAVLA, a framework for latent cluster analysis of VLA models, and conduct a layer-wise study of the state-of-the-art GR00T N1.5 model, with particular focus on its action decoder. To better characterise the latent space during action diffusion, we introduce a cross-attention-based embedding-weighting method that amplifies relevant features while suppressing less informative ones. Quantitative evaluation shows that weighted clustering consistently outperforms the baseline. To improve interpretability, we extract human-interpretable concepts for each cluster, linking latent representations to semantic descriptions. Our analysis shows that latent clusters progressively disentangle spatiotemporal and kinematic features, with representations becoming more refined in the middle layers and stabilising toward the output. As such, LAVLA advances the interpretability of language-driven robotic systems.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.02634 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.02634v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.02634 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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