Contrastive Conceptor Activation Steering (COAST): Unlocking Vision-Language-Action Models through Hidden States
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage powerful perceptual priors from web-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) pre-training, yet they remain surprisingly brittle in practice, frequently failing at simple robotic tasks. To mitigate this, we propose Contrastive Conceptor Activation Steering (COAST). COAST builds on the notion of a "conceptor", a linear operator that soft-projects data into the principal components of a target distribution. COAST uses conceptors to identify success-critical subspaces for a target robotic task from a few examples of success and failure rollouts. At inference time, it steers VLA latents into these identified success subspaces to improve task outcomes. Acro...
| Authors | Miranda Muqing Miao, Subin Kim, Brandon Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 16 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 May 2026 |
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