Verify, Act, Distill: Turning Test-Time Compute into Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models

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Article Summary

Test-time compute (TTC), which scores multiple candidate actions at inference time, is a powerful way to improve the execution performance of vision-language-action (VLA) models, but existing methods keep the policy frozen, so the gain must be recomputed at every execution. We propose Verify, Act, Distill, a framework that consolidates the gains of TTC into the VLA itself. A fixed verifier scores candidates generated by a flow-matching VLA, the weighted aggregate is executed, and the observations and aggregated chunks from successful adaptation episodes are distilled directly into LoRA parameters with the standard flow-matching loss. This reuses supervision that TTC has already produced during execution, without additional reinforcement learning or rollouts dedicated to teacher generation. On the 40 LIBERO tasks with a SmolVLA 5k checkpoint, distilling from only 10 episodes per task raises the mean success rate of verifier-free single-candidate generation from 54.1% to 70.6%, retaining about 74% of the improvement obtained by aggregating eight candidates. Applying the same aggregation to the distilled policy further raises the success rate from 76.4% to 82.3%, with a particularly large gain on LIBERO-Long (44.0% to 57.8%), and the single-candidate policy also improves on LIBERO-plus, which contains distribution shifts. These results show that using verification as a learning signal, rather than only as an execution-time selector, both retains the improvements of TTC and re-amplifies the effect of subsequent TTC.

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