InSight: Self-Guided Skill Acquisition via Steerable VLAs

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.g., "move gripper to the bowl", "lift upward", "pour the bottle"). InSight consists of two primary stages: (1) an automated segmentation pipeline that partitions demonstrations into labeled primitives via VLM plan decomposition and end-effector poses to enable VLA primitive steerability, and (2) a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives required to accomplish a novel task, autonomously attempts demonstrations of the missing primitives with VLM-proposed low-level control, and automatically labels, stores, and integrates successful demonstrations into the VLA training set. We evaluate InSight across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring, without any human demonstrations of these target skills. Once learned, these primitives can be composed to execute novel, long-horizon tasks without additional human demonstrations. Our findings demonstrate that primitive steerability provides a practical foundation for continual skill acquisition in VLA policies. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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