arxivcs.RO2026-07-03
Feeling the Unexpected: ResTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Residual Tactile Representation
Pengwei Zhang, Bin Xie, Xinpan Meng, Xinyu Guo, Ce Hao, Fang Deng, et al.
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 w…