Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

Published June 11, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

• UGV-Conditioned Multi-UAV Informative Planning on a Shared Exposure Belief
• SAFER-Nav: Enhancing Safety for Visual Robot Navigation via Segmentation-Aware Fine-Tuning
• Explore From Sketch: Accelerating UAV Exploration in Large-scale Environments with Prior Maps