Feeling the Unexpected: ResTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Residual Tactile Representation

arXiv:2607.03387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile perception is indispensable for contact-rich manipulation, yet integrating it into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often induces modality collapse, where high-bandwidth visual features overshadow sparse tactile cues. Inspired by Predictive Coding, a neural mechanism where the brain attenuates predictable inputs to prioritize surprising stimuli, we propose ResTacVLA. Rather than treating tactile data as raw input, we reformulate it as a ...