VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs

Video-Action Models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising framework for embodied intelligence, learning implicit world dynamics from raw video streams to produce temporally consistent action predictions. Although such models demonstrate strong performance on long-horizon tasks through visual reasoning, they remain limited in contact-rich scenarios where critical interaction states are only partially observable from vision alone. In particular, fine-grained force modulation and contact transitions are not reliably encoded in visual tokens, leading to unstable or imprecise behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Video-Tactile Action Model (VTAM), a multimodal world modeling framework that incorporates tactile perception as a complementary grounding signal. VTAM augments a pretrained video transformer with tactile streams via a lightweight modality transfer finetuning, enabling efficient cross-modal representation learning without tactile-language paired data or independent tactile pretraining. To stabilize multimodal fusion, we introduce a tactile regularization loss that enforces balanced cross-modal attention, preventing visual latent dominance in the action model. VTAM demonstrates superior performance in contact-rich manipulation, maintaining a robust success rate of 90 percent on average. In challenging scenarios such as potato chip pick-and-place requiring high-fidelity force awareness, VTAM outperforms the pi 0.5 baseline by 80 percent. Our findings demonstrate that integrating tactile feedback is essential for correcting visual estimation errors in world action models, providing a scalable approach to physically grounded embodied foundation models.

Accelerating Optimization via Differentiable Stopping Time

Optimization is an important module of modern machine learning applications. Tremendous efforts have been made to accelerate optimization algorithms. A common formulation is achieving a lower loss at a given time. This enables a differentiable framework with respect to the algorithm hyperparameters. In contrast, its dual, minimizing the time to reach a target loss, is believed to be non-differentiable, as the time is not differentiable. As a result, it usually serves as a conceptual framework or is optimized using zeroth-order methods. To address this limitation, we propose a differentiable stopping time and theoretically justify it based on differential equations. An efficient algorithm is designed to backpropagate through it. As a result, the proposed differentiable stopping time enables a new differentiable formulation for accelerating algorithms. We further discuss its applications, such as online hyperparameter tuning and learning to optimize. Our proposed methods show superior performance in comprehensive experiments across various problems, which confirms their effectiveness.