English

Grounding Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Models Through Explicit Language-Action Alignment

Robotics 2026-04-08 v1

Abstract

Achieving robot transparency is a critical step toward effective human-robot collaboration. To be transparent, a robot's natural language communication must be consistent with its actions and explicitly grounded in the task and environment. Existing hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can generate language (e.g., through chain-of-thought) and low-level actions. However, current work does not consider explicit alignment between these modalities during training. To address this crucial gap, we propose a novel training framework that explicitly grounds hierarchical VLA sub-task descriptions with respect to the visual observation and action space. Our framework uses a contrastive model to assess the alignment between generated language and corresponding action trajectories. This contrastive model enables direct ranking of different language-trajectory pairs based on their alignment, allowing us to refine the grounding of our hierarchical VLA through offline preference learning. We apply our framework to the LanguageTable dataset, a benchmark dataset of human language-annotated trajectories, and provide critical insights into multimodal grounding representations, all while establishing a strong baseline that achieves performance comparable to fully supervised fine-tuning and minimizing the need for costly data annotations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.05614,
  title  = {Grounding Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Models Through Explicit Language-Action Alignment},
  author = {Theodor Wulff and Federico Tavella and Rahul Singh Maharjan and Manith Adikari and Angelo Cangelosi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.05614},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:56:59.248Z