@inproceedings{wei-etal-2026-libra,
    title = "Libra-{VLA}: Achieving Learning Equilibrium via Asynchronous Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System",
    author = "Wei, Yifei  and
      Zhong, Linqing  and
      Liu, Yi  and
      Lu, Yuxiang  and
      He, Xindong  and
      Yao, Maoqing  and
      Ren, Guanghui",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1848/",
    pages = "39799--39815",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation by grounding high-level semantic instructions into executable physical actions. However, prevailing approaches typically adopt a monolithic generation paradigm, directly mapping visual-linguistic features to high-frequency motor commands in a flat, non-hierarchical fashion. This strategy overlooks the inherent hierarchy of robotic manipulation, where complex actions can be naturally modeled in a Hybrid Action Space, decomposing into discrete macro-directional reaching and continuous micro-pose alignment, severely widening the semantic-actuation gap and imposing a heavy representational burden on grounding high-level semantics to continuous actions. To address this, we introduce Libra-VLA, a novel Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System VLA architecture. We explicitly decouple the learning complexity into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy to strike a training equilibrium, while simultaneously leveraging this structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy. The Semantic Planner predicts discrete action tokens capturing macro-directional intent, while the Action Refiner conditions on coarse intent to generate high-frequency continuous actions for precise alignment. Crucially, our empirical analysis reveals that performance follows an inverted-U curve relative to action decomposition granularity, peaking exactly when the learning difficulty is balanced between the two sub-systems. With the asynchronous design, our approach offers a scalable, robust, and responsive solution for open-world manipulation."
}