StereoVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Stereo Vision


Shengliang Deng, Mi Yan, Yixin Zheng, Jiayi Su, Wenhao Zhang, Xiaoguang Zhao, Heming Cui, Zhizheng Zhang, He Wang

Paper ID 88

Session VLA Models

Poster session details TBA

Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in generalist manipulation, they often lack fine-grained spatial awareness and struggle with viewpoint generalization. This limitation largely stems from the reliance on pretrained RGB encoders, which lack explicit geometric cues and prioritize semantic alignment over geometric representation. We argue that effective visual representations for VLA models must jointly encode both semantic and geometric information. In this paper, we introduce StereoVLA, the first VLA model to incorporate rich geometric cues from large-scale synthetic stereo data. StereoVLA employs a Geometric-and-Semantic (GeoSem) vision encoder that extracts geometric cues from subtle stereo-view disparities for precise spatial perception, while simultaneously capturing semantic features from pixel observations to support language-conditioned manipulation. Additionally, we introduce two synergistic co-training objectives: Interaction-Region Depth Estimation for precise spatial reasoning, and Camera Parameter Estimation to implicitly align perception and action coordinate systems. Compared with baselines that employ various input modalities, StereoVLA achieves a 33.4% improvement in real-world experiments and demonstrates robust generalization to near-hemispheric camera perspectives.