StableVLA: Towards Robust Vision-Language-Action Models without Extra Data

Yiyang Fu; Chubin Zhang; Shukai Gong; Yufan Deng; Kaiwei Sun; Qiyang Min; Qibin Hou; Yansong Tang; Jianan Wang; Daquan Zhou

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arXiv · 2605.18287

StableVLA: Towards Robust Vision-Language-Action Models without Extra Data

Yiyang Fu·Chubin Zhang·Shukai Gong·Yufan Deng·Kaiwei Sun·Qiyang Min·Qibin Hou·Yansong Tang·Jianan Wang·Daquan Zhou

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Abstract

It is infeasible to encompass all possible disturbances within the training dataset. This raises a critical question regarding the robustness of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models when encountering unseen real-world visual disturbances, particularly under imperfect visual conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic study based on recent state-of-the-art VLA models and reveal a significant performance drop when visual disturbances absent from the training data are introduced. To mitigate this issue, we propose a lightweight adapter module grounded in information theory, termed the Information Bottleneck Adapter (IB-Adapter), which selectively filters potential noise from visual inputs. Without requiring any extra data or augmentation strategies, IB-Adapter consistently improves over the baseline by an average of 30%, while adding fewer than 10M parameters, demonstrating notable efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, even with a 14x smaller backbone (0.5B parameters) and no pre-training on the Open X-Embodiment dataset, our model StableVLA achieves robustness competitive with 7B-scale state-of-the-art VLAs. With negligible parameter overhead (<10M), our approach maintains accuracy on long-horizon tasks and surpasses OpenPi under both synthetic and physical visual corruptions.

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Yiyang Fu, Chubin Zhang, Shukai Gong, Yufan Deng, Kaiwei Sun, Qiyang Min, Qibin Hou, Yansong Tang, Jianan Wang, Daquan Zhou. 2026-05-18. StableVLA: Towards Robust Vision-Language-Action Models without Extra Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18287

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