TempoBridge: Language-Guided Tempo Control for Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2610.09451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are effective at understanding what task to perform, but provide limited control over how it should be executed, such as moving quickly or slowly. We introduce TempoBridge, a lightweight framework that uses frozen VLA representations to modulate actions according to tempo cues in the instruction at each task phase, without additional tempo-conditioned robot demonstrations or tempo-specific base-policy fine-tuning. TempoBridge extracts tempo cues from contextual VLM representations, aligns them with task progress through a causal phase router, and modulates nominal motion commands during execution. Across LIBERO tasks, TempoBridge improves Tempo Success Rate from 52.6% to 89.7% under canonical tempo instructions while retaining high task success. It also preserves near-baseline performance when no tempo cue is present and generalizes to unseen tempo expressions without additional training. Experiments on a physical robot further demonstrate language-conditioned tempo modulation in real-world manipulation.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-10-08