Abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have become a promising paradigm for end-to-end robot control, but their effectiveness still depends heavily on large volumes of demonstration data. In manipulation tasks, this dependence is compounded by structured spatiotemporal uncertainty in the action space: multiple nearby actions or trajectories may successfully solve the same task, while semantically equivalent demonstrations often unfold at different speeds. Standard pointwise supervision treats each demonstrated action as an exact target, imposing an unnecessary learning burden under such uncertainty. We present SURE, a data-efficient VLA training framework that explicitly models both spatial and temporal uncertainty. SURE augments a VLA backbone with a lightweight transposed-convolutional probabilistic action decoder that captures spatial uncertainty through local correlations among neighboring action bins. It further introduces Soft-DTW alignment supervision to accommodate local timing variations between predicted and demonstrated action chunks. Together, these two components reduce sensitivity to demonstrator-specific poses and execution timing, enabling more data-efficient action learning. We evaluate SURE on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world manipulation tasks. Even with only 10% of the demonstration data or 20% of the training steps, SURE achieves manipulation success rates that match or surpass baseline VLAs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09684
