Action-chunking robot policies predict sequences of future actions, but deployment requires choosing how many actions to execute before replanning. The execution horizon trades off feedback frequency against motion continuity. However, success varies non-monotonically with the execution horizon, and the best-performing horizon differs across tasks. These effects make a single fixed horizon unreliable as a default execution strategy across tasks. We propose PACE (Phase-Aware Chunk Execution), a training-free method that selects execution horizons online from predicted action chunks. PACE uses prominent low-speed valleys in the predicted speed profile as candidate replanning boundaries, exploiting the phase-dependent kinematics of manipulation trajectories. By default, PACE calibrates the valley threshold from each task's existing training demonstrations, without task-specific fixed-horizon tuning. On the 50-task RoboTwin2.0 benchmark, PACE improves average success from 57.8% to 64.2% over the strongest fixed-horizon baseline and outperforms the adaptive execution baselines AAC and AutoHorizon. With GR00T N1.7 on LIBERO, PACE achieves the highest overall success rate among the evaluated strategies, supporting its applicability across base policies, benchmarks, and action representations. On real robots, PACE improves the average task score from 60.7 to 77.7 and success rate from 50.7% to 70.4% over full-chunk execution. Code is available at https://niejunnan25.github.io/pace-project/.
Yixue Zhang, Wenke Xia, Kun Wu, Wenbo Yu, Pei Ren, Junnan Nie, Di Hu, Zhengping Che 等 9 位作者
Reasoning informs decision-making by connecting intended actions with their expected consequences. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models incorporate embodied chains of thought (ECoTs) to guide action generation. However, such guidance remains implicit, as actions are conditioned on ECoTs rather than explicitly optimized to align with them. We introduce CoRAct, a consequence-grounded reasoning-to-action alignment framework that explicitly aligns reasoning and action through reward-guided optimization in action noise space. CoRAct formulates two physically grounded ECoT components as verifiable signals: movement specifies intended motion, while waypoints encode expected spatial consequences. A unified Mixture-of-Transformers jointly models ECoT reasoning, action generation, and action-conditioned future prediction. For candidate actions generated from sampled noise, CoRAct computes alignment rewards based on movement consistency and agreement between predicted outcomes and specified waypoints. These rewards guide group-relative optimization of the initial noise distribution, steering action generation toward consistency with intended actions and expected consequences. Experiments across RoboCasa, VLABench, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improvements in task success, generalization, and reasoning-execution alignment over strong ECoT-based VLA baselines. CoRAct also grounds externally provided ECoTs in executable behavior, enabling zero-shot adaptation to novel scenarios by leveraging knowledge from powerful vision-language models. Project page and dataset: https://onlyxingxingzyx.github.io/CoRAct/
Junnan Nie, Zitian Fan, Jiachen Zhang, Junyi Lao, Likui Zhang, Chenghao Liu, Xiaoyang Lu, Yunbo Wang 等 17 位作者
Learning task progress from robot demonstrations provides a practical way to construct dense shaping rewards for robotic reinforcement learning. A common approach uses normalized demonstration time as progress labels, implicitly assuming monotonically increasing task progress. During policy exploration, however, actual task progress can stall or even regress. Such models may mistake regressions for progress, assigning positive shaping rewards to actions that cause progress loss. Real suboptimal and failed executions offer corrective experience, but assigning absolute progress values to their states is difficult. Our key observation is that stalls, regressions, and recoveries establish local relative progress relations even when absolute progress is unknown. We introduce Event2Reward, which uses normalized temporal labels to anchor the progress scale and these within-trajectory relations to constrain local changes, combining absolute and relative progress supervision. Its progress predictions serve as potentials for reward shaping. We curate an event-annotated dataset from approximately 100K raw real-robot execution records, covering successful, suboptimal, and failed executions, without requiring framewise absolute progress labels. Under the same training budgets, Event2Reward improves average policy success by 18.16 percentage points over a baseline using only sparse task rewards across 40 tasks in four LIBERO suites. On real robots, average success after 30 minutes of wall-clock training reaches 60.0% on three precise insertion tasks and 90.0% on three object manipulation tasks, exceeding the sparse-reward baseline under the same budget by 36.7 and 23.3 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies further show that absolute progress supervision and relative progress relations are complementary, with joint supervision yielding better downstream policy learning.