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Guided Action Flow: Value-Guided Sampling for Frozen Vision-Language-Action Policies

Liuhaichen Yang Zhuang Jiang Chenchao Sheng Ningwei Bai Qichen Yin Hanbo Ma Junkai Liu Junkai Sun Dongcheng Lyu Yi Dong Zezhi Tang
Oct 2026
Artificial Intelligence Robotics

Abstract

Reinforcement learning can improve vision-language-action (VLA) policies beyond supervised fine-tuning, although this typically involves further updates to the policy parameters. For flow-matching policies, iterative action generation provides an additional opportunity to incorporate task information during inference. We introduce Guided Action Flow (GAF), which learns a compact, observation-conditioned action-value critic from robot task rollouts and applies its action gradient to steer reverse-time flow sampling. The supervised-fine-tuned VLA remains frozen throughout critic learning and deployment. Physical-robot experiments show an increase in aggregate success from 60.0% to 82.5% across six nominal manipulation tasks. Under six altered-lighting and object-distractor conditions evaluated on three of these tasks, aggregate success improves from 34.2% to 49.2%. Ablations and rollout analyses support the importance of the learned guidance direction and the critic's visual and proprioceptive inputs. With approximately 2.735M trainable critic parameters alongside a 0.45B-parameter VLA, GAF enables task outcomes to inform action generation through a compact inference-time guidance module.

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