Rewiring Semantics, Dynamics, and Control: A Simple yet Effective Action-Centric Tri-Stream Transformer

arXiv:2610.11416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent framework for complex robotic manipulation, building on the strong semantic understanding of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such VLM backbones offer insufficient physical dynamics priors, which limits the generalization capabilities of robot policies. Recent efforts therefore integrate video-generation World Models (WMs) into robot policies through various strategies, using predictive dynamics to facilitate action generation. Despite these advances, harnessing semantic understanding and dynamics prediction as complementary guidance for action generation remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce $\mathrm{ACT}^3$, a simple yet effective Action-Centric Tri-Stream Transformer that fuses semantic and dynamics information into control actions while preserving the distinct roles of context streams. Specifically, $\mathrm{ACT}^3$ enables the dedicated action expert to access VLM and WM representations through layerwise attention, with each backbone attending only within its own stream. This straightforward interaction design maintains independent forward propagation in the context streams while allowing both backbones to be updated through control supervision. Experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation benchmarks show that the proposed $\mathrm{ACT}^3$ yields results superior to its counterparts.

Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent framework for complex robotic manipulation, building on the strong semantic understanding of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such VLM backbones offer insufficient physical dynamics priors, which limits the generalization capabilities of robot policies. Recent efforts therefore integrate video-generation World Models (WMs) into robot policies through various strategies, using predictive dynamics to facilitate action generation. Despite these advances, harnessing semantic understanding and dynamics prediction as complementary guidance for action generation remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce $\mathrm{ACT}^3$, a simple yet effective Action-Centric Tri-Stream Transformer that fuses semantic and dynamics information into control actions while preserving the distinct roles of context streams. Specifically, $\mathrm{ACT}^3$ enables the dedicated action expert to access VLM and WM representations through layerwise attention, with each backbone attending only within its own stream. This straightforward interaction design maintains independent forward propagation in the context streams while allowing both backbones to be updated through control supervision. Experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation benchmarks show that the proposed $\mathrm{ACT}^3$ yields results superior to its counterparts.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.11416 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.11416v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.11416 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Rewiring Semantics, Dynamics, and Control: A Simple yet Effective Action-Centric Tri-Stream Transformer

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