PermVLA: Factorization Order as a Regularizer for VLA Learning
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly learn action chunks through a fixed left-to-right (LTR) factorization, although the same expert trajectory distribution admits many valid chain-rule factorizations. We identify factorization order as an overlooked regularization choice and introduce causally anchored permutation (CAP), which samples action reveal orders with a tunable chronological prefix. Its auxiliary objective trains one shared policy to predict actions from different known subsets of the same expert chunk, while deployment retains deterministic LTR control. We call this conditional-set augmentation: it creates multiple conditional prediction problems from one expert chunk without adding demonstrations. This discourages reliance on the single chronological prefix used by ordinary teacher forcing. Controlled experiments show that CAP consistently outperforms standard LTR training on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus, with the same advantage appearing in cross-dataset CALVIN evaluation. A diagnostic that measures the expected squared difference between a chunk's joint log likelihood under two reveal orders verifies that CAP training internalizes agreement across reveal orders. These findings position sampled subset-conditioned auxiliary objectives as a general recipe for constructing VLA regularizers, illustrated by an extension to diffusion action generators.