Temporal Forcing: 4D Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract:Recent vision-language-action (VLA) methods improve manipulation performance by aligning their representations with 3D scene geometry. However, these methods often struggle with long-horizon manipulation and observation aliasing between visually similar states due to a lack of temporal information: the 3D scene geometry captures only the current state, rather than how it has evolved over time. To resolve this, we present Temporal Forcing, a 4D representation alignment method for VLA models. Specifically, we first introduce a history pathway that enables a vanilla VLA model to summarize observation history into temporally aware latent representations. Then, the latent representations are aligned with the geometric features extracted by a pretrained 4D foundation model, which captures the evolving 3D world through temporally consistent geometric representations, enabling a deeper understanding of dynamic environments. Temporal Forcing reaches 98.8% on LIBERO, outperforming its base model by 2.2 points. On a physical hidden-placement task, it raises full-task success from 20.0% to 43.3%. Code will be publicly available.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.30643 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.30643v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30643 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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