Neural Implicit Action Fields: From Discrete Waypoints to Continuous Functions for Vision-Language-Action Models
About
Despite the rapid progress of vision-language-action (VLA) models, the prevailing practice of predicting action chunks as discrete waypoints remains structurally misaligned with the intrinsic continuity of physical motion. This discretization arises naturally from fixed-rate robot data collection and the token-by-token prediction paradigm of large language models, but ties actions to rigid sampling rates, does not naturally support analytically consistent higher-order derivatives, and introduces quantization artifacts that hinder precise, compliant interaction. We propose Neural Implicit Action Fields (NIAF), which reformulates chunk-level action representation from discrete waypoints to continuous action functions. Using a vision-language model as a hierarchical spectral modulator over a learnable motion prior, NIAF synthesizes continuous-time action manifolds with arbitrary temporal resolution. This formulation enables analytical differentiation, allowing explicit supervision of velocity and regularization of higher-order derivative signals to promote mathematical consistency, physical plausibility, and control smoothness. Our approach achieves strong results on CALVIN and LIBERO across diverse backbones. Real-world experiments further confirm that NIAF supports stable impedance control, bridging policy-side action generation and execution-side smooth control.