Paper Detail

Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: Lifelong Vision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Yao He, Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang, Fazeng Li, Yang Cong

arxiv Score 27.4

Published 2026-07-16 · First seen 2026-07-17

Research Track A

Abstract

Similar to the natural capabilities of humans to sequentially learn new tasks, robots with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models should possess lifelong learning ability to learn a new task when deployed in open-world environments. However, most recently proposed lifelong learning models aim to effectively learn the current task (plasticity) or maintain high accuracy on previous tasks (stability), while the plasticity-stability trade-off remains largely unsolved in robotic manipulation models. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a cache-efficient lifelong Vision-Language-Action learning framework for robotic manipulation (i.e., LifelongVLA), which alleviates the plasticity-stability trade-off with a dual-timescale adaptation mechanism while achieving low-cost robotic deployment with a cache-efficient replay strategy. More concretely, we propose a dual-timescale LoRA gating module to decompose VLA adaptation into two lightweight pathways: a short-term adapter for plasticity and a long-term adapter for stable consolidation. These pathways are integrated via a task-aware gate, enabling explicit control of the plasticity-stability trade-off. In the skill replay phase, a cache-efficient stochastic replay strategy is proposed to preserve more balanced retention signals without full-trajectory storage. Finally, experiments show that LifelongVLA outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating efficient skill expansion, robust retention of learned manipulation behaviors, and reduced reliance on retraining for real-world deployment on an xArm robot.

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BibTeX

@article{he2026human,
  title = {Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: Lifelong Vision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation},
  author = {Yao He and Gan Sun and Wenqi Liang and Fazeng Li and Yang Cong},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Similar to the natural capabilities of humans to sequentially learn new tasks, robots with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models should possess lifelong learning ability to learn a new task when deployed in open-world environments. However, most recently proposed lifelong learning models aim to effectively learn the current task (plasticity) or maintain high accuracy on previous tasks (stability), while the plasticity-stability trade-off remains largely unsolved in robotic manipulation models. To },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14852},
  keywords = {cs.RO},
  eprint = {2607.14852},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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