Wiring Matters: Injection Topology and Initialization of Affordance Heads in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Abstract:Dense affordance supervision is an appealing auxiliary signal for vision-language-action (VLA) policies, yet naively co-training an affordance head can severely damage instruction following. We present a controlled study of how to wire such a head into a modern VLA on the LIBERO benchmark. Our recipe reads the backbone through a stop-gradient and re-injects an intermediate head feature into the action expert via a learned bridge. The stop-gradient is a precondition: letting affordance gradients reach the backbone drops the policy below the headless base (85.5% vs. 93.1%). With the backbone protected, a same-budget 2*2 ablation over injection topology (concatenation vs. residual) and bridge initialization (zero vs. random) shows initialization is the dominant lever. The best wiring, an actively initialized residual bridge, reaches 96.2%, matching the far more elaborate three-expert AffordanceVLA (95.8%) with under 1% extra parameters. Two probes explain the mechanism: ground-truth affordances fed as an input hurt, and inference-time zeroing shows a lazy bridge acts only as a training-time regularizer while an active bridge becomes load-bearing.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.06318 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2610.06318v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06318 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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