DS-VLA: A Dendritic-inspired Vision-Language-Action Model for Robust Action Control

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance in language-conditioned manipulation, yet success under nominal evaluation does not necessarily translate into robust closed-loop behavior when executed actions are transiently corrupted. We introduce DS-VLA, a dendritic-inspired action architecture that incorporates dendritic spiking dynamics into VLA control to address this limitation. Specifically, to enable modularized feature processing and temporal information integration, DS-VLA equips action neurons with multiple sparsely connected dendritic branches, each featuring heterogeneous, learned decay factors. Furthermore, to suppress unreliable state updates while preserving task-relevant historical information, we introduce a neuron-wise inhibitory gate that adaptively regulates the admission of new multimodal evidence into dendritic states prior to somatic dynamics. We evaluate DS-VLA on all four LIBERO suites under both nominal rollouts and a unified closed-loop action-perturbation protocol. DS-VLA achieves a 91.6\% average nominal success rate and an 87.35\% average perturbed success rate, retaining 95.4\% of its nominal performance. Under the same reported perturbation setting, OpenVLA-OFT, FAST, $\pi_0$, and GR00T achieve 39.45\%, 23.90\%, 28.55\%, and 30.75\%, respectively. A controlled ablation isolates the contribution of neuron-wise shared inhibition, while analyses of neural dynamics and post-perturbation trajectories associate robust performance with selective evidence suppression and effective behavioral recovery. Together, these results demonstrate that integrating brain-inspired computational mechanisms offers a promising architectural prior for robust embodied intelligence beyond merely scaling vision-language backbones or generative action decoders.