Unleashing More Actions via Action Compositional Training for VLA Models
About
Vision-Language-Action models excel at robotic manipulation, driven by the scale and diversity of demonstration data. However, standard training paradigms often cause VLA models to severely overfit to specific behavioral patterns, rendering them unable to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios even when those scenarios merely require novel combinations of identical sub-skills. While expanding datasets can mitigate this overfitting, acquiring high-quality robot data remains notoriously labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive. To resolve this impasse without expensive human teleoperation and to truly unleash more actions,i.e., enable VLA models to compose known sub-skills into a much broader set of executable behaviors beyond the original demonstrations-we propose ACT-VLA (Action Compositional Training for VLA Models), an offline data augmentation framework that leverages the model's latent task representations to synthesize novel, physically valid demonstrations directly from existing tasks for policy training. By eliminating additional manual data collection, our method automatically expands the training distribution and mitigates overfitting. We evaluate our approach on challenging manipulation tasks in simulation. Experiments demonstrate that while baseline VLA models generalize poorly due to original distribution overfitting, policies trained with our synthesized data achieve substantially higher success rates, validating that leveraging existing tasks for automated demonstration synthesis provides an effective, scalable, and data-efficient route to broadening VLA generalization.