2025/06/19 by Li, Puhao, Wu, Yingying, Xi, Ziheng +8 · 20 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.16211
openalex publication_date 2025/06/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Learning real-world robotic manipulation is challenging, particularly when limited demonstrations are available. Existing methods for few-shot manipulation often rely on simulation-augmented data or pre-built modules like grasping and pose estimation, which struggle with sim-to-real gaps and lack extensibility. While large-scale imitation pre-training shows promise, adapting these general-purpose policies to specific tasks in data-scarce settings remains unexplored. To achieve this, we propose ControlVLA, a novel framework that bridges pre-trained VLA models with object-centric representations via a ControlNet-style architecture for efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, to introduce object-centric conditions without overwriting prior knowledge, ControlVLA zero-initializes a set of projection layers, allowing them to gradually adapt the pre-trained manipulation policies. In real-world experiments across 6 diverse tasks, including pouring cubes and folding clothes, our method achieves a 76.7% success rate while requiring only 10-20 demonstrations -- a significant improvement over traditional approaches that require more than 100 demonstrations to achieve comparable success. Additional experiments highlight ControlVLA's extensibility to long-horizon tasks and robustness to unseen objects and backgrounds.