QDepth-VLA: Quantized Depth Prediction as Auxiliary Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv:2510.14836v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spatial perception and reasoning are crucial for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to accomplish fine-grained manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches often lack the ability to understand and reason over the essential 3D structures necessary for precise control. To address this limitation, we propose QDepth-VLA, a general framework that augments VLA models with an auxiliary depth prediction task. A dedicated depth expert is des
QDepth-VLA: Quantized Depth Prediction as Auxiliary Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models
Overview
arXiv:2510.14836v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spatial perception and reasoning are crucial for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to accomplish fine-grained manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches often lack the ability to understand and reason over the essential 3D structures necessary for precise control. To address this limitation, we propose QDepth-VLA, a general framework that augments VLA models with an auxiliary depth prediction task. A dedicated depth expert is designed to predict quantized latent tokens of depth maps obtained from a VQ-VAE encoder, enabling the model to learn depth-aware representations that capture critical geometric cues. Experimental results on the simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that QDepth-VLA yields strong spatial reasoning and competitive performance on manipulation tasks.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
