Relational Spatial Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

Overview & Synopsis

Spatial understanding is essential for robots to perceive their surrounding environments and execute actions. Existing approaches typically encode 3D awareness into vision-language-action (VLA) models by directly aligning their representations with pre-trained 3D foundation models. However, we observe that such direct geometric feature alignment essentially exploits 3D foundation priors as a form of low-rank regularization in the feature space, resulting in severe rank collapse of the pre-trained VLA representations. In contrast, we shift the focus from enforcing point-wise equality to aligning pair-wise relationships. We propose a representation-alignment method that enables the injection of 3D spatial awareness without compromising the model's original expressivity. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks, our new spatial reasoning benchmark, and real-world manipulation scenarios demonstrate that our approach effectively incorporates 3D spatial representations into VLA reasoning, achieving robust performance and enhanced spatial awareness across diverse manipulation tasks.