Demystifying When and Why VLAs Fail in Contact-Rich Tasks and How to Fix Them
We address the problem of understanding when and why Vision-Language-Action models struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require precise physical interaction. Prior work has primarily focused on addressing contact failures through force-augmented architectures and training-time regularizers, yet the root causes of these failures remain underexplored. We identify two distinct failure modes underlying this gap. Precision failures are rooted in a flow-matching policy training mismatch, and force failures arise from the distinctive structure of force signals. We address each failure mode with a targeted mechanism and combine them into FACT, which achieves 66% average success rate...
| Authors | Carlota Parés-Morlans, Nils Kuhn, Isabel Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.