Catch Me If You Can: Real-Time Feedback Denoising for Responsive VLAs

Email: jyh216@utexas.edu

Pick up the rolling can

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

Drop the lemon into the moving cup

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

Pick up the bread

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

GR00T (Baseline)

GR00T (Baseline)

Note: VLA-Feedback maintains performance comparable to GR00T on static manipulation tasks.

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by combining semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language models with expressive action-generation policies. Diffusion-based action generators are particularly effective for modeling temporally coherent action chunks, but these chunks are typically executed open-loop after inference. This limits responsiveness when objects move, contacts change, or the scene evolves during execution. We propose VLA-Feedback, a two-timescale architecture that combines low-frequency diffusion planning with high-frequency visual feedback. Rather than fully denoising an action chunk before execution, VLA-Feedback retains its final denoising step as a lightweight feedback interface, allowing each action to be corrected using the latest observation before it is executed. This design preserves the expressiveness of the diffusion planner while enabling real-time action correction without rerunning the full vision-language diffusion model. VLA-Feedback matches GR00T on static LIBERO tasks while improving average success on dynamic simulation tasks from 27.5% to 85.0%. On real-robot tasks, it improves average success from 51% to 73%.

Simulation Results

* denotes an unseen-generalization task, testing an object, speed, or color not seen during training.

1D Moving Robot

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

2D Moving Robot

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

Drop Ball to Cup

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

GR00T (Baseline)

GR00T (Baseline)

GR00T (Baseline)


Catch Block*

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

1D Robot Speed*

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

Drop Ball Color*

VLA-Feedback (Ours)

GR00T (Baseline)

GR00T (Baseline)

GR00T (Baseline)

The videos highlight a major failure mode of the GR00T baseline: delayed reactions to changes in object motion. When a moving target suddenly stops or changes direction, GR00T continues executing actions based on an outdated observation. In contrast, VLA-Feedback uses the latest observation at every control step, allowing the robot to respond much sooner and adjust its motion accordingly.