English

Enhancing Linguistic Generalization of VLA: Fine-Tuning OpenVLA via Synthetic Instruction Augmentation

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-18 v1

Abstract

Generalization remains a core challenge in embodied AI, as robots must adapt to diverse environments. While OpenVLA represents the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) in Vision-Language-Action models by leveraging large-scale pre-training, its zero-shot performance can be limited when encountering completely new environments. This paper proposes a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to enhance the linguistic generalization of OpenVLA by synthesizing a general instruction set for the Bridge Dataset V2. The paper leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a rich variety of semantically equivalent but structurally diverse commands for existing trajectories. In this experiment, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is implemented to fine-tune OpenVLA on augmented pairs, allowing the model to bridge the gap between complex natural language intent and robotic actions. Results demonstrate that the LoRA-enhanced model's robustness, suggesting that enriching the linguistic space of specialized datasets is crucial for embodied agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.16044,
  title  = {Enhancing Linguistic Generalization of VLA: Fine-Tuning OpenVLA via Synthetic Instruction Augmentation},
  author = {Dongik Shin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16044},
  year   = {2026}
}