动作专家该训练VLM吗？混合Transformer VLA中的动作Token监督与梯度路由
Should the Action Expert Train the VLM? Action-Token Supervision and Gradient Routing in Mixture-of-Transformer VLAs
Asher James Hancock, Boyi Li, Yuxiao Chen, Shuhan Tan, Wenhao Ding, Thomas Tian, Yan Wang, Boris Ivanovic 等 9 位作者
AI 速览：该研究在自动驾驶与机器人操作中解耦动作Token监督和专家到VLM的梯度耦合，考察梯度隔离是否仍是VLA训练的合理默认。
Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly pair a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) with a flow-matching expert that conditions its action predictions on the VLM's key-value representations. Those representations must carry information useful for control, yet the VLM was never trained for the action expert's flow-matching objective. Two signals can address this: gradients backpropagated from the expert's loss (coupling), or VLM supervision to predict discrete tokens encoding the same target actions. Prominent training recipes forgo the first, blocking expert-to-VLM gradients (insulation) to protect the VLM's existing capabilities, while also supervising it on vision-language data and action tokens. Because vision-language co-training also aims to preserve those capabilities, the additional protection provided by insulation is unclear. At the same time, insulation removes a direct signal about which features continuous action prediction requires. On the other hand, action-token supervision offers an alternative way to learn action-relevant representations, which may explain why insulation succeeds in practice. We disentangle these factors in autonomous driving and manipulation by independently varying action-token supervision and whether the expert's loss updates the VLM. In open-loop driving, insulation is competitive with coupling when action tokens are supervised; without them, coupling reduces trajectory-prediction error by roughly 25%. When both components are trained jointly from the outset, coupling increases closed-loop driving route progress by approximately 17% with action-token supervision and 40% without it, and similarly improves robot manipulation performance under both settings. These findings show that the value of gradient insulation depends on the VLM's action supervision and the evaluation setting, challenging insulation as a default VLA training recipe.